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Chronicling the two years I spent building a laser in my garage
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.
A quick update and demonstration of how critical keeping the KTP a constant temperature is.
Now that I have proof I can make the laser work, it’s time to tackle getting the Z-Fold cavity 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!
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.
I’m going to start a series of posts chronicling my attempt to build a laser…mostly from scratch.
You know it’s a bad sign when my “hobby project” has quarterly updates….and has now been going for five years. But I learn a little each day. Let’s recap some of my recent knowledge.