I haven’t been spending as much time on the Laser Project as I once did. Life, it turns out, often has other priorities. Still, I’ve furthered my understanding a bit.

It’s spring 2024 and the laser work marches slowly on.

A quick update and demonstration of how critical keeping the KTP a constant temperature is.

My MATLAB laser simulation makes some predictions.

So I built a laser last year. It worked but didn’t perform great. Let’s find out why.

It’s time to build a chassis and case for the laser.

Now that I have proof I can make the laser work, it’s time to tackle getting the Z-Fold cavity to lase.

Getting my homemade laser to lase.

So far I’ve had a lot of posts describing the electronics if this project, but the real meat of the thing is the physics and optics. It’s time to start digging in.

I’ve finished the control board for The Laser Project. This is a small AVR-based microcontroller board with a simple OLED screen and a rotary encoder for making selections.

I needed to revise the power board I’m using for driving the pump laser diodes. The current power board is still a little noisy — it doesn’t work at all if you don’t have an EMI filter on the data bus, and it will stop working if you turn the current up too high. Also, since I designed it I changed how the bus interface connector is going to work. Time for another revision!

The final TEC board is done and appears to work great.

My second prototype TEC controller was a bit of a failure but the same circuit on a real board fares much better.

I redesigned my TEC controller to use the LTC1923 chip so I can use higher powers on the outputs.

The next board to design is a TEC controller board to control temperatures of the laser.

A lot has happened since I “finished” the power supply I plan to use for The Laser Project. It turns out I wasn’t as done as I thought.

Summary of my custom designed power supply.

I’m going to start a series of posts chronicling my attempt to build a laser…mostly from scratch.