2020 World's most powerful CW handheld laser

hey everybody it's the year 2020 and I want to celebrate now typically on this channel I like building crazy contraptions out of old garbage but today I want to change that up a bit and build something using some cutting-edge laser technology now the goal here is to build something that soundly stupidly powerful because it don't write reckless demonstration of the fact that we are living in the future whoo let's be honest what could be a better way to celebrate the times when we think of technological advancement we usually think of our electronics getting smaller and more powerful no lasers are no exception to this with high-power laser is becoming more efficient and available in smaller packages recently I was able to score an engineering sample for this absolute monster of a blue laser diode array Reed for a whopping 95 watts of output power and probably capable of quite a bit more than that so naturally I want to jam this thing into a tiny housing for a hilariously dangerous laser pointer now in fact going off the rated output power alone this thing should actually make for the most powerful CW a handheld laser in the entire world so yeah without further ado let's get to building there's a lot that goes into building a record-breaking laser project one of the nice things about the internet ages I don't have to grind out grant applications in order to fund a project like this instead I get to promote cool products yeah that's right this video is sponsored but unlike most investors my sponsor is totally cool with me following resources into building something for the coolness factor alone and in fact I want to give a big THANK YOU to Rage shadow legends for sponsoring this video you've probably heard about rage shadow legends at this point so many people are playing but to those who haven't had the chance to play it yet rage is a free to play dark fantasy RPG mobile game with incredible 3d graphics in an amazing storyline to go along with it if you're tired of all your RPGs being all cartoony and cutesy you'll be pleasantly surprised by rate shadow legends the mobile gameplay here is really on the level that you'd expect from a console or PC game and in fact there's actually a cross-compatible PC version already it's actually literally insane how these graphics look because just ten years ago all I could play is snake on this thing ha I do love dropping the acid rain on my enemies the new battle pass feature is a great way to collect a bunch of useful rewards through daily and weekly challenges season one is open now go to the video description and click on the special links and if you're new player you'll get 100,000 silver 50 gems in energy refill and the champion adjudicator to find all this loot just go to your in-game inbox right here the adjudicator is a super tough champion in the game and will be really useful for new players who look at are just late ways to our enemies so what are you waiting for let's play oh yeah I should warn you that all the crazy stuff that you're about to see was done completely for educational purposes in fact if you were to try any of this stuff at home you'd probably die so yeah please don't try this at home now there's some shady stuff going on with this crazy laser diode array because it's apparently made by Nietzsche but if you actually go to the website there's actually no information available on this part in fact there's a datasheet here was just given to me by the person who sold it to me so that means that either this part's fake or the public just isn't supposed to have these things yet you're now going off of past experiences with powerful laser diodes I'm actually going to bet it's the latter but either way it can't hurt to fire this thing up just to make sure it works alright so you strap the laser array onto this heatsink here and that adds some test leads now this this silicon thermal padding is an exactly ideal I won't be running this thing very long for this little test alright I have it sitting just below threshold there it is now ready to fire up alright here goes nothing oh geez Wow look at that beam man sign up the whole room there too that's insane and gosh what's that like 1020 percent of the rated power oh man all this thing is gonna look ridiculous at full power Wow oh and check that out you can see how the little beam that's there too I wasn't expecting this to be so visible oh man Wow oops I better kill it before I like that beam stop and fire know it's funny because part of the reason why this array even exists is to prevent hobbyists from using them now it turns out that one of the biggest uses of blue laser diodes is in hybrid DLP projectors and the manufacturers are sick of us tearing them apart for the lasers I guess what little money that they make from those sales just isn't worth the bad publicity if somebody gets hurt now by combining all the lasers into one small part I think that they can stop us from using them and in fact this is explicitly stated on some data sheets for laser diode now what they don't account for his cycles like me that'll just run the entire way at once using a giant battery pack on the thermal cam you can see that it doesn't take long for this laser to heat up and really that's no surprise considering the extreme power density of this little unit now since laser diodes hate heat I'm gonna have to be extra careful that I don't bake the poor thing when it gets split inside the laser pointer housing all right so that's not screwing around for the time being it's time to get to building for the laser is housing I'm gonna use this sweet retro looking radar a gun that my friend scored from a junkyard now amazingly this thing was actually amused till just a couple years ago now at least according to this calibration sticker here now why it got thrown away I'm not quite sure maybe it finally broke or maybe just got replaced by something newer but either way I'm just thankful that I got saved before meeting the trash compactor because this thing is just way too cool to get scrapped for its metal content I went ahead and tore down that radar gun there and I have to say there's a lot of cool stuff inside this thing for one you have these old-school through-hole PCBs then obviously this really nifty microwave horn here and there's even some maintenance logs here that go back to the 90s and check this out if you look at this board here this is was made in 1985 so that means that this thing was being used for like 35 years in the field which is actually really impressive no I won't be needing most of the parts on this thing other than this switch here and then obviously this really cool casing this is essentially going to be a scaled up version of my other giant handheld lasers so long with the laser array need to fit in a power source a constant current driver and some method of cooling now this isn't exactly gonna be easy so it's a hundred watt laser and a handheld unit is literally insane like that's the same output powers this monster surgical laser over here heat is gonna be the biggest issue here since I'll be feeding the laser about 300 watts no of that a little over a third of that power is gonna be emitted as laser light which is actually really efficient but still that means there's an extra 200 watts of heat plus whatever's wasting the drivers to get rid of now if I'm building this into a bench top unit I'd use Tec cooling or even liquid cooling for solid thermal regulation but this just isn't practical in a handheld unit since that would actually generate more total heat to deal with so I'm just gonna resort to using a big heat sink as for coming up with a right heat sink I suppose you can take some measurements and make a 3d model that can be cnc'd Oh Who am I kidding I don't know anything about 3d modeling software power tools are a lot more fun so I'm just gonna hack at this hunk of aluminum here until it fits in the housing [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] all right so here's the completed heatsink now is it ugly coil yeah but part of the reason why I'm using this radar casing is so you can't tell that it's total trash on the inside now some space is so limited I'll be attaching the drivers to it also now you can't just hook up laser diodes to a battery and expect them to survive more than a second you need some sort of current regulation now there are a lot of ways to make a constant current driver but I ended up going with LM 338 which actually isn't as stupid as you might think now for one they're simple to implement and provide a steady output but they're also surprisingly efficient when ran at the higher end of the rated voltage and along with a small input to output voltage differential I decided to run the laser diodes at 3.2 amps per string which is pushing them event since the manufacturer only suggest 3 amps probably be running them for short increments of time now I'm taking this risk since I really want to clear the elusive 100 watt mark which has likely never been done in the handheld laser now going off of the stated slope efficiency curve driving the laser diodes at three point two amps should give an output power of 100 1.8 watts yikes alright so here's a quick rundown of what the circuitry looks like inside so I stuck a voltmeter here to read the voltage of the batteries so right here's a thermometer to read the temperature at that laser diode array when I stuck a lot of switches on this thing this is the main power switch here let me use this switch that came with the unit as a safety switch it also feeds into a indicator LED that's on the front here now as for the trigger I didn't quite trust it to handle the high current that those lasers were going to take so instead I just have it signaling to this massive MOSFET here to handle the bulk of the power switching as for mounting the laser array I need to be absolutely sure I can wick away the heat as fast as possible to the aluminum I end up using what the pros use indium foil now indium is excellent for thermal bonding since it is extremely soft like you can cut a bar of it with a butter knife now by bolting down the array over a sheet of indium the indium spreads out to fill voids and left for my imperfect machining now that I got everything mounted my final task is to add a beefy source of power for this circuit now this is where lithium battery tech saves the day yet again as powering this 30 volt 13 amp circuit is a cakewalk for these two batteries here now in theory I should get about 7 minutes of runtime per charge but will likely end up being a little bit lower than that I did not leave myself watch space to jam those batteries and ID to rewire some connections as well as modified the battery casings a bit to make them fit but even so they just barely fit in there and yeah it was scary trying to close the case because shorting the batteries would cause a fiery nightmare to say the least okay everything's put together now yes it's finally time to test this thing out but first I got to put on my laser goggles cuz seriously just looking at the output of this thing on a surface is definitely enough to burn your eyeballs out alright so here's the main power switch they can see the readout there for the battery voltage and then the temperature then right here's the safety switch which arms a laser alright here goes nothing wow that's insane Wow check out how it lights up my whole shop there completely overpowers the light oh man that's a scary amount of power Wow so just to give you an idea and how stupidly powerful this laser is of a couple other lasers here to compare it to it's this laser right here is five milliwatts so direct hit from anything strong in this is gonna cause eye damage faster than you can blink or even just a reflection off of a shiny surface now this laser right here is 500 milliwatts or half a watt so that puts in the highest laser danger rating there is so that means that not only is it a fire hazard but it's looking at the spot on a service can burn your eyeballs out without goggles and then there's this laser which eclipses that rating 200 times over I mean seriously there's no sane reason for something like this to even exist and yeah Here I am flaunting it on a youtube video ok so what can I even do with it the same thing as any other gadget that isn't boring like stuff on fire check out how the raw output just torches my desk I'm not even using a lens here the power density is already way higher than my laser bazooka as for the other burning tests let's start with the easy stuff I wonder how fast I can pop these balloons with the laser let's try it on a paper bag huh well that's terrifying geez that lit on fire like nothing yeah this thing is a lot of fun can the raw output ignite wood I'll take that as a yes how about a ping-pong ball all right that's pretty cool it turns out ping-pong balls are surprisingly flammable due to their nitrocellulose content speaking of nitrocellulose here's a little bit of flash paper since I'm already igniting a bunch of random stuff I might as well put that chemistry degree of mine to use and whip up something exciting [Applause] huh I love lighting stuff on fire this right here is one of my most requested laser experiments can I cook a steak one way to find out mmm that smells so good listen to that baby sizzle huh can you thought microwaves were bad at cooking food all the way through some people might ask how hot is the beam itself well the thing is there isn't actually a temp yeah it's hot okay well the beam doesn't exactly have a temperature but it certainly can heat up objects very quickly now how hot depends on a lot of factors but this piece of wood here heats by hundreds of degrees in under a second let's tackle another popular viewer question can I send electricity down the laser beam to test this I have a voltage multiplier stack that produces very high voltage DC when the leads are closed the field is strong enough to ionize the air and cause an arc to form but when they're further apart the field is weak enough that the only current that passes is from Corona now when I shoot a laser between the gap there's no arc as the beam is not conductive now if the laser were millions of times more powerful it could rip apart the molecules in the air to make a conductive plasma but unfortunately I can't do that with this laser I can cheat a bit using fire though by sticking some matches between the gap I can ignite them with the laser to generate some thermal ions what happens here is that these ions get accelerated by the field and then smash into other neutral molecules in the air which generates more ions this process cascades until you have a giant arc between the electrodes all right so the raw output of the laser is certainly impressive I still think I can do better I wonder how much more damage it could do if I use a lens to focus down the beam a smaller spot means more damage a shrinking the beam size in half will actually quadruple the power density on the target I mean anybody who's played with a magnifying glass on a sunny day can attest to this but that being said using a lens to focus on a laser ray does have its issues even from simple ray optics you can see that a lens doesn't actually combine the beams as it also images the gaps between them plus you have effects like spherical aberration and the fact that each individual beam is diverging and anisotropically to make matters worse but the thing is using any sort of beam correction on an integrated array like this is incredibly difficult as far as lens systems go I found what's probably the best option for the laser and a prototype projector I'd sitting around it's a big AR coated F theta lens that's rated for high laser powers I made a mount for it using PVC fittings and then stuck in front of the laser array so how much more damage can it do using a piece of wood as a target shows that the beam shrinks to 1/5 of the original size which means a 25 fold increase in power density it's crazy how instantly wood ignites the beam this makes it really great at engraving wood I've never had a handheld laser that scores wood so easily there's nothing like a nice refreshing bottle of soda after a long day of building death rays but it looks like I forgot to bring a bottle opener what am I supposed to do now oh yeah I almost forgot I can just use the most powerful handheld laser in the world [Music] well that's certainly frightening yeah that's molten glass you're looking at and that was probably the most metal thing I've ever done on this channel I wonder if I can use the laser to burn DVDs huh do you get it how about some coarse steel wool ooh pretty orange sparks okay this one's total overkill but let's cut some electrical tape and that was pretty satisfying can the laser strip the paint off of this steel lid one way to find out huh it works but not very great actually it seems to be damaging the metal itself okay that's pretty ridiculous I wonder if the beam can punch all the way through wow that's crazy I did not expect to see the day where I could shoot through metal with a handheld laser think that's just unbelievable it wasn't even that long ago that a blue laser of this strength would require the setup the size of a building to operate so check out my massive argon ion laser that was made in 1995 now by massive of course I'm referring to its physical size the physics going on here is really cool where the laser emission is coming from an ionized argon plasma inside the tube this particular system makes nine distinct colors that are apparent when the beam is split up with a diffraction grating but for all but just a few applications there argon laser has been rendered obsolete by the blue laser diode so why is that this behemoth of a laser only outputs about 70 milliwatts yet it takes a whopping 1500 watts to produce that output it's crazy just how fast laser tech has progressed I mean this laser isn't even that old it's only a couple years older than my can't put it in yet this handheld laser bill in 2020 is well over a thousand times stronger while consuming a quarter of the electricity and also only being a fraction of the size now I think that's pretty cool while this laser is definitely pushing the envelope for power to size factor I'm not the one who made this kind of build possible this project is actually based on two recent Nobel prize-winning technologies there's the lithium-ion battery that won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2019 and the blue LED that won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2014 lithium batteries are in edible and their energy storage capabilities and that's why they're using our phones and laptops and pretty much everything around us I actually used a small lithium battery to jumpstart a car last month then there's the blue LED which directly led to the blue laser diode the award here wasn't given for portable death Ray's but instead for the highly efficient and long-lasting white light sources made from them without either of these technologies this project would not have been possible so the real credit goes to all the scientists and engineers who worked on this groundbreaking research how that being said how happily be remembered as the nut case that jammed a 100 watt laser in a handheld device now I do want to clarify my claim that this is the most powerful handheld laser in the world I'm referring to CW here because pulsed lasers can have very high peak powers while having low average power I build a handheld laser four years ago they had higher peak power but only four bursts of ten billionths of a second per shot but for a continuous wave laser that you can hold in your hand with a fully contained power source I'm fairly certain that this is the most powerful in the world one last thing I should mention is that you don't have to get in a record-breaking territory before lasers get dangerous this one watt blue laser from eBay will damage your eyes by just looking at the spot and would shut the lights up forever with a direct hit if you aren't wearing goggles these $3 laser pointers from eBay can shoot a hole in your retina faster than you can blink even without a direct hit since they're usually way stronger than advertised if you're interested in the hobby of lasers awesome with the right precautions it's a very educational hobby but my goodness please read a bunch about laser safety before ever ordering a laser online alright so that's all I have for you today but until the next time stay safe and happy lazing

Channel: styropyro

Views: 5,293,694

Rating: 4.8961768 out of 5

Keywords: laser, world record, science, egineering, handheld laser, gadget, diy, build, maker, nobel prize, lithium battery, blue led, led, laser diode

Id: W6FbUiiwutQ

Length: 20min 48sec (1248 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 13 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Sup3r6]

Been following Styro for a while. The things he does are a bit insane to say the least. Well worth a follow.

[u/lerizz]

But can he pop popcorn from space?

[u/Octospider]

I don't know why. But, his voice makes me uncomfortable.

[u/Crapscalion]

Why does this anime character have so many lazers

[u/Slider388]

Major lazer.

[u/YourFinestPotions]

This guy is as close as we’ll get to a real-life supervillain.

[u/opposite_locksmith]

"I don't have to grind out grant applications..."

Translation: "I don't have to try to lie to learned men of science about how dangerous my plans are."

[u/618smartguy]

I was ready to call BS on the title until I saw it was Styro. If it's him then you know its legit.

[u/the_innerneh]

his body language when he speaks looks like woody