Bare&Basic CD and DVD Burning Laser Diodes How to use all their types

today Ozzie nor Dillard on this is the very basic video of which many of you have been waiting to see and if you're just getting to building your old lasers you've probably seen other videos that talk about taking the CD or dvd laser doubts from these full-sized optical drives and using them to build your very own laser pointers or modules however some of these videos can be rather confusing or just in general incomplete trust me I know I've made a few of these videos myself however in this video I'll be remedying all that by showing you how to use nearly any form factor of CD or dvd laser diode in your projects one of the problems is that some of the phaser diodes don't follow the five point six or three point eight millimeter standard sized laser diodes and often come in really weird form factors and these form factors are commonly found in the slim drives from laptops I actually have a rather large amount of things of which I'll be working with in this video I got a whole bunch of laser drivers and laser diodes a whole bunch of optical sleds of which I can harvest even more out and if that wasn't enough we can get to the bottom of this box to figure out everything that we need you I'm not limited by using the common style laser diodes and neither should you let's start out by talking about some of the bare essentials you'll need for your CD or dvd laser diode project the first bare essential it is a soldering iron and this will definitely come in handy when you go to connect to each laser diode or laser driver you'll need something to put your laser diode in in which case there are a couple of common hosts that you can get for the sizes of three point eight millimeters and five point six millimeters these are great for laser pointers there's the five point six millimeter version and so will the laser diode just presses right into the back probably I've seen this in some of my other videos and on the front is the lens and the tension spring and the spring just keeps see lens locks or doesn't wiggle around and gives it some pressure on the threads and then the same thing here except this is the three point eight millimeter equivalent so smaller hole basically same thing different sizes I also recommend that you get a kit of the red green and violet laser pointers it's pretty cheap again but this will give you a little bit more flexibility mmm za the reason why I don't recommend a red laser driver for just off eBay is because they always give me some form of trouble here's one I have with the 700 milliwatts 638 nanometer or Clairol demonstrate the problem is a soft start and other features are a little goofy so I'm going to put this into the vise and we're gonna see just a lot of things for this day that actually turn on and I'll show you another problem so here have a another red laser driver same thing for the Oh 700 milliwatt red laser boughs and I have a large red LED from a video projector can I could do it oh no what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna connect this up to my adjustable power supply and give it about 2.8 volts how about I guess the problem is is that uh and don't regulate very well so take I'm like turn five to get the red output from the LED put that up there so you can see the output and I'm going to turn the potentiometer I know this should change the brightness of the LED and you see it does next day nothing so that's a little weary on the red laser drivers green laser drivers they're awesome no problem with them if you want to go with building a module you can get a TTL or analog laser driver there are several different kinds on the market I love these little guys hey I do really well well I would definitely say a voyage of these and the problem is is they'll charge up the capacitor I know when laser diode is cut off from the power capacitor tends to overcharged and then money lasered out is reconnected to the driver a lot more current goes to the laser and diode itself cooks it will be going over different laser diode types and different driver types along with the precaution of how to connect them up and how do I tell voltage and current and all the other Jes and with all of that the meter is a another essential so we're going to be using this in both the voltage and in the current settings would also recommend getting a little set of screw terminals with some loose wires or just a another set of wires that you can plug into your major and solder and the loop between your laser diode and laser driver let's go hunting for some laser diodes so here I have a full-sized dvd/cd burner combination drive and on the inside of these there's usually the 5.6 millimeter laser - so they works great with the posts that you can find online pretty easily the laser diodes are located on the optical sled and that is this little bit right here that moves back and forth and reads to CD maybe they're pretty easy to get to you okay so maybe I'd like just a little bit when I said they're easy to get to that was a little bit more difficult than I had expected maybe the most difficult time I've ever had getting out a DVD burner oh well you know we're here now all right so there are two laser doubts usually the DVD and the CD burner lasered out and take a look at those and identify them it was a wonderful spot of which to attack from there the magnet in the screwdriver is uh non-existent at this point alright looks like here on the upside it doesn't have to go back together alright looks like maybe we only have one laser diode in this optical stud - potentially ours where is the other one that looks like the DVD looks like the reader all right I'll wait maybe it's a combination of find out usually the DVD burning laser damage is a sign its own little separate metal mount it's that easy to break out looks like that and it's a weird UV open can style well that'll look nice under the microscope on it oh really the best way is to break these out and I'll be doing that is a little bit we're gonna put this one on the side and I'm gonna take one out of a laptop some drive now the upside is is these are a lot more delicate and much quicker to break oh yeah I don't really care about doing things the little less violent way that easy so this is a super multi drive so I'm betting that it's gonna have one of those really weird little flat laser diode packages somewhere in there oh no looks to be a three point eight millimeter laser diode right here so let's get that out and there might be another one for the IR to the CD I'm not seeing it could be another little open can style how do I know from group I have snapper boat oh yeah definitely for the DVD you can see that a blue reflection off the little coating itself as an AR coating to prevent uh reflections back into the laser assembly and when it's blue it's for the DVD at a little bit of a greeny type of color when it's for the infrared alone and all you'll see that later on so here we have our two red burning later dabs and I'll be extracting them from the little metal housing of which they're in the best way to do this is with a little side angle cutters like this and I'm going to be cutting the material away from the laser diode and that way I don't have to put any kind of excessive force on it and this is particularly important because they're both open can so I have to be a little mindful of where you're cutting and how you're cutting but I usually doesn't give me much of a problem you by a fluke of dumb luck I have just removed two identical laser diodes that's not exactly the way I wanted things to go so I have two more optical studs here and these ones have different laser diodes in them as well this one has both the CD and DVD burning laser diodes separately so one of these will be the DVD and the other one will be the CD I'm betting that the one for the DVD is going to be this one and it's usually as I said on its own little separate heatsink block where as you can see that the CD one is a little bit more recessed inside of the optical sled let's take those out and unless you get these are both a 5.6 millimeter common style laser diode I will get them out in no time well there's one and then we got this one I believe is C red for the DVD that'll snap off just like that I know there's both our laser diodes no well they're still attached to the optical slurred I'm gonna go ahead and decide of them I'm gonna pull the laser diode assembly I wouldn't away from the optical sled while doing that get some better focus on that excellent they're just two of these that need to be disordered and that is oh yes definitely the red so this is Cir we can take a look at the AR anti-reflective coating on that one and check out the Reunion color I was talking about so I'm here take a look yeah that's kind of a greenish type of reflection to it or as the VVD has a much more blue reflection boy that's hard to see I know we'll quickly break those out of the little holder as well same method using the little cutters cut right next to the laser diode seen right there one like that grab it by the side and we'll pull the weight they material just like that that came up real nice this one the DVD burner French there we have it more leisure doubts to play with let's take a look at the laser diode in this slimmer right a slimmer drive optical slide from a laptop and as you can see it's going on magnetized I don't think I need Java as you can see there's the little laser assembly right there yes that is a laser assembly so let's free that up and get that laser diode assembly out and there it is now let's take out the other laser diode for the DVD burner which is located on the other side of the optical sled over here there we go and that is a DVD for any laser diode check this out and I'll be showing you a little bit more of this in the video we'll be connecting up one of these so I have one of these one of those laser diode either guy who just put in to a little module and they work really well actually yeah let's get a bunch of laser diodes put underneath the microscope and take a look at the internal structure of the package of which the laser diodes are in and get a better understanding of how to connect up and wire these laser diodes so that way you can use any of these form factors of which I just pulled out and then some in your own projects here we are now underneath the microscope and just for a relative size reference this is a 5.6 millimeter laser diode we can also see the little canister of which is bonded to the top and this little canister just prevents things like moisture or dust or impact from damaging the laser die on the inside of the laser diode I've opened up one of these little laser diodes and now we can see the inside of what's going on and this is where the magic happens under higher magnification we can see the laser dye itself which is this little rectangular block in the center of your screen that's connected on the top and bottom much like an LED and other PN junctions are by two layers so there's one way right there and there's a other way right on the bottom so this little rectangular block is the important thing that we're gonna be looking for in these laser diode packages so take a good look at it it's pretty hard to miss even though it's pretty tiny here's another form factor of laser diode and this one comes from the Xbox 360 I'm not really sure what this form factor is called but it's basically a metal base plate with a plastic encapsulation around it and the plastic encapsulation provides support for the lead wires going inside and electrical insulation from the lead wires you'll see that there are little gold bond wires that go to two semiconductor components the first semiconductor component that Square and mark 29 is just a photo sensor and what that does is it detects how much light is coming off the laser diode and to the right of the photo sensor the laser guide itself which is a read-only laser dye so it's small and has three bond wires in most likelihood this produces both the red and the infrared used for reading different optical media I'll be using a couple of these form factor laser diodes for test coming up later on in the video they also do make burning laser diodes of this form factor and you'll notice right away that the actual laser dye itself is significantly larger and this one is capable of producing anywhere from 150 to about 200 millivolt achill output you'll notice that this one also has three bond wires and is probably also capable of producing both the red and the infrared for different optical media the general construction is the same as the one from the Xbox 360 words a metal base plate and the plastic encapsulation that houses the lead wires going into the laser diode assembly let's take a look at some more complicated form factors of laser diodes and these not only have the laser die on the inside but all of the optical sensors needed for things like tracking and reading the information off the optical storage medium this one is about eight millimeters long four point seven millimeters wide and five millimeters tall and has two rows of seven pins along with one case pin and one pin for the laser diode let's take a look at the inside of the laser assembly and we can see right in the center there is the alator die with the output side facing up towards us and to its left the sensor array under higher powered magnification we can see the laser die itself a little bit more and we can also tell us directly bonded to the material that the laser diode package is made of which means that the case pin or the pin that shares continuity with the outside of the laser diode package will be one of our electrical inputs on top of the the laser die is another Gold Bond wire and that goes to an insulated pin on the rear of the laser diode package to the left of the laser die is the sensor array and it's basically a little processing chip that has several different photo sensors on it here we have one of the older ceramic style of the all-in-one laser diode form factors and it measures roughly eight by six millimeters this also has both the laser die and the sensors for reading the information on the optical disk as ten connections five on the top and five on the bottom and I believe this to be a read only for the cd-rom let's take a look at the two major components on the inside of this laser assembly firstly let's take a look at this piece right here which has four gold bond wires on the top if you notice to the left you see a little gold rectangle and that is the laser dye itself so that Gold Bond wire coming from the top of it is one of the electrical connections to the laser guy above that on the top of the enlarger block you'll notice that there is another Gold Bond wire that is connected to a trace that leads to the bottom of the laser dye this will be the other electrical connection for the laser dye itself underneath that on the very bottom you'll see two more gold bond wires and this is for the photo sensor that detects how much light is coming from the laser dye on this side is the sensor array once again it's just an IC that has a couple of photo sensors but there's something to note between the two of those now that we're at higher magnification there's something very important that I want to point out you'll notice that the laser die is on the right and the photo sensors are on the left when I'm going to do now as I'm going to go down with my microscope objective lens and I want to point out that I can focus on the area that is underneath the laser dial but what I can't do is focus on the area that is between the laser dial on the photo sensors and the reason for that is this area right here is actually on a 45-degree plane answers as a reflector for the elated I output to demonstrate this I'm going to be focusing on the laser die with the reflection of that 45-degree angle giving us a 90 degree view of the output of the laser eye and you can almost kind of makeout worthy Gold Bond wire is on the top this is actually where these laser output for these form factors come from a 45-degree reflector that bounces the laser light output at 90 degrees this will be a very important thing to keep in mind while looking at the next two laser diodes let's take a good look at one of the most visually satisfying packages of laser diodes to look at and this is the modern equivalent to the form factors we saw before that has both the elated eye and all of these sensors for tracking and reading the information off the optical medium it measures about 10 millimeters long four millimeters wide and two millimeters tall and has 16 electrical connections but only two of those connections will have to worry about let's take a look at the inside of the Aliza's outer package and as you can see it's a work of art with greater magnification we can now get any more comprehensive understanding and how these laser diode form factors actually work we take a look at the left side you can see that there are four photo sensors and I believe that these are for optical tracking of the laser beam we take a look at the right there are a couple of rows of photo sensors and I think that these are for taking the information off the optical storage medium between both of those is the laser diet itself I can see a gold bond wire on top of the laser dye this is one of the electrical inputs for the laser dye itself and underneath we can see a gold trace that is also powering the laser dye both of these two connections lead to two gold bond wires that jump over a portion of the chip and onto two more traces of gold these traces of gold also connect you to bond wires and lead to the two outside pins on one side of the laser diode case which should be these two pins right here other things to note about these form factors of laser diodes are things like the little photo sensor of which is often located near the rear of the laser dye itself and detects the amount of laser light that it's being produced and just like the previous laser diode package I showed you this one also has a 45 degree reflector that is located near the front of the laser diet and reflects the light that is being produced up and outwards at a 90 degree angle from the top of the laser diode package let's now take a look at the CD burning equivalent to the DVD burner we just took a look at and it's pretty much the same form factor as often found any optical stand drive pulled from the laptop the only difference between the DVD burner and the CD burner is that the CD burning assembly often comes with this little plastic block that has a refractor on the top but this doesn't prevent us from seeing the inside of the laser diode and it's pretty much the same construction there's the laser to die and on top of there is a gold bond wire and that's one of the electrical connections meanwhile underneath elated eye is a another gold phrase and it's the same construction with the two jumper wires going over a portion of the chip and then out you two of the laser diode leads on one side now that I've talked about the construction of various laser diodes let's talk about the destruction of a house and for that I have one of the Xbox 360 laser diodes marketed in this vise they're capable of doing both the infrared and the red I have the red portion of that laser diode look up and I have a piece of white plastic here of which we can see the bear on collimated output of the laser diode assembly and all that means is that there's no lens in the front to focus it also I have the adjustable power supply here which is capable of both regulating in volts and in current or amps I'm going to turn off the light first let's regulate the amount of power going through the laser diode using voltage and the amount of voltage he later died junction requires is often determined by the chemistry of these laser diode Junction as I turn up the voltage I want to explain some of the characteristics the first range we'll hit is the threshold range where the laser diode starts to lease which is usually anywhere from one point nine to two point one volt depending on the size of your laser diode Junction and you can see that the laser diode itself is really touchy this is a five milliliter diode so I have to be very cautious with how far I'd turn it up after threshold you'll start to get the nominal operating range and after the nominal operating range then you hit the peak output powers which is where you start to risk damaging your laser diode Junction now I'm gonna show you right here you can kind of see it when we start to go past the nominal operating range and into peak you're gonna see some mode hopping of the laser diode Junction and it's gonna kind of flicker and give us some patterns so now we're under the pea-green and if I leave it here the laser diode will actually start to dim out a little bit and that's actually because it's warming up and the laser diode Junction is expanding consuming more current heating up more and it starts say runaway process because it just feeds up on one another let's push it past the peak power and right into catastrophic optical damage which is where physical damage actually occurs on the semiconductor mirrors is it dead let's bring it down and find out no it's not war I can't believe that laser diode is still working honestly more oh it's dead okay well we didn't go tennis trophic optical damage about we probably blew the little bond way right off the top of the laser die let's go check out what happened well this was unexpected the whole laser die itself exploded luckily we have more now let's cover controlling the amount of energy going to your laser diode using a current regulated power supply and to help with that I once again have the red LED that's pulled from the Casio slim projector I have my power supply set to 10 volts and 100 milliamps so what happens if I connect up the LED to my power supply we get a significant voltage drop but the current holds at a hundred milliamps we have to think about the power supply like a factory the voltage is the shipping speed of the electrons and the current is the factories ability to produce electrons so when the demand for the electrons is exceeded the voltage drops because they ship slower let's test out the voltage drop with a few resistors here's a 33 ohm same current but not quite as much voltage drop 24 ohms we get more of a voltage drop 2.2 ohms a rather significant voltage drop and finally one ohm this is important because as a laser diode warms up it becomes more conductive and when something becomes more conductive it wants to draw a more current in order to prevent a laser diode from burning out using a current regulated power supply is very important because this limits the amount of current that the laser diode is trying to take once again I have one of the xbox360 laser diodes connected up to my power supply and the voltage is still set to about 10 volts however I have the current set all the way down now it can be very difficult to find a good datasheet for the particular diode of which you've extracted from your CD or DVD burner so it's quite important to note the voltage ranges of the chemistry in the laser diode Junction I'm going to slowly turn up the current coming out of the power supply and we should get a nice smooth ramp up through the diodes full output brightness I'm going to bring it up to about 1.9 volts and see how that looks now I'm not adjusting the voltage I'm simply turning up the current that's promising let's go for tools through two point one volts two-point jewels and yes I am turning up the current very slowly nope and it's dead here's where things get difficult and this is because a lot of these laser diodes of which you extract from a CD or DVD burner have absolutely no physical markings this makes finding a datasheet for them nearly impossible so to help with this I'll be running a few tests I'll be doing some tests first with the infrared laser diodes and when I do I'll be using my full-spectrum camera and then with the red laser diodes I have said up here my multimeter and a laser power meter what I'll be doing is I'll be connecting up at the théâtre diodes to this current regulated laser driver and I'll be turning up the power to the laser diode until they die hopefully this will give me enough information so I can graph out Worthy voltage and where the current ranges are this should help you connect up your laser diode without cooking it I do these kind of tests so you don't have to according to the tests that I've just run with the CD burning laser diodes it looks like the same operating range as two volts at about 130 million this gives us a continuous way of optical output of about 70 milliwatts now if this seems rather low to you keep in mind that when the CD or dvd laser diode is writing to the optical storage medium it's being pulsed and pulsed energy can be significantly greater than continuous wave output and continuous wave is just a fancy word for saying always-on let's get into testing the DVD burning laser diodes well it looks like we've collectively learned something today and that is these particularly the drivers do not work very well with the red DVD burning laser diodes however I have a whole bunch of the red DVD burning laser diodes connected up to green laser pointer drivers of which I've modified and I'll be taking the voltage and the current measurements off these and this will make a great segue into how to modify the green laser pointer drivers to operate with the red DVD burning laser diodes with all the tests done on the DVD burning laser diodes it looks like the universal safe range of which the drives a map is about 2.8 5 volts at 180 milliamps and this will give you around 110 milliwatts of continuous wave optical output now many channels will also show you how to use an lm317 voltage regulator as a constant current source by shorting out the output of the regulator with a resistor well on the captain of this channel and I say don't even bother with that so the next thing I'm gonna be showing you is how to modify one of the green laser pointer drivers so that way you can use them with the CD or DVD burning laser diodes modifying a green laser pointer driver is actually really easy to do and you only need to do this if your green laser pointer driver doesn't have a potentiometer what's a potentiometer it's this little thing right here and you probably already have one on an optical sled there's usually two potentiometers one for the infrared and one for the red laser and the first thing you're going to need to do is take one of those off the second thing you'll have to do is locate the adjustable precision shunt on your green laser driver which is this little three lead piece right here so the two resistors you're going to need to remove are these two resistors right here the next thing that you'll have to do on your green laser pointer driver board is define the two points that share a connection from the four points the resistors were on to do that you can use visual inspection or a multimeter and for my board it's the two connections that are closest to the adjustable current shunt that's where the sweeper of the potentiometer is gonna go and the sweeper is this little third pin right here not be used to so let's go ahead and get this on the green laser driver board what's the modification is completed to your green laser pointer driver you should have an excellent source of which to control the current going to your CD or DVD burning laser diode see I told you these were great no it's time to put theory into practice and for this I'll be assembling different laser diode modules using a mix of different laser diode form factors and laser diode hosts for my power supply I'll be using this modified green laser pointer driver and it's basically the same modification except this external potentiometer has a different at that stop point so it'll make things go a little quicker let's start with the common 5.6 millimeter laser diode form factor you'll need a laser diode hosts and something to press your laser diode in with on almost any 5.6 millimeter laser diode regardless whether it's a CD or DVD burning laser diode the case pin is the negative connection and this pin off to the right is the positive connection that's outer wires up for that with those two wires in place now we connect up the negative to the laser driver and then we put the meter in current mode now we put this into the loop so I'll be soldering the red wire from my meter to the positive output of the laser diode driver and then the negative to the positive side of the laser diode and we'll turn up the laser diode driver until it reaches a hundred and 80 milliamps - the now let's try one of these three-point eight millimeter dual wavelength laser diodes of which I extracted in the beginning of the video I'll be running the infrared laser diode at 130 million and I'll be running the red laser diode at 180 million I already have one of them pre mounted inside of this three-point eight millimeter laser diode host let's connect it up and see how well it works I'm gonna test the infrared laser diode portion of it out first oh that's nice that works really well let's try the red well that works really nice too yeah now we're officially going into uncharted territory the bit of which I'm most excited for now we're gonna use this form factor of laser diode and you're probably wondering how on earth would you actually do that well there's one important thing to note first and that is if you look on the bottom the plastic dips down a little bit lower than the rest of the metal base plate on the bottom why is that important well let me show you I do actually have a solution for this here's my solution pretty simple so the wiring is actually pretty easy to the white wire is for the positive for the infrared the black wires seek common ground and the red is for the red dvd laser diode let's hook this up and see how well it runs I'll be once again using one hundred and thirty million for the infrared and one hundred eighty milliamps for the red and hopefully it goes well absolutely perfect now for the red oh yeah and that's how you use that here's what I want to point out that you could actually do the exact same thing and all I did was file the top off of this laser that I would host and I filled in a little hole with solder and then just filed that flap and you could do that with these kinds of hosts as well so mounting them isn't as difficult as you may think finally I'm gonna use these form factors of laser diodes and now that you've seen them under a microscope you should have a better idea of what's going on on the inside so the first step is to locate the laser die in the center and then the bond wires and faces that go to the pins on the outside of the laser diode package and the two pins will always be in one of the corners on the laser diode the most outer pin in which case my upper right pin is C negative and the second pinion is the positive here's what I did to use one of those form factors of laser diodes inside of a laser pointer assembly and it's pretty simple so I removed the punked-out from the back of the green laser pointer and I would also recommend that if you do this to fill it up with solder and the reason why I say that is because that little gold area right in the middle is actually the thermal contact for keeping the laser that cool in order to multi-leaves it out what I did is I something just glued it on the top of this portion just like that and you can see my wiring on the side though there's the outside for the negative and then I just soldered all the other wires including that second pin up or the positive on the inside I took the collimating lens assembly from the green laser pointer and cut the top off and then I just put any other lens in from a purple laser pointer earlier in the video we already saw that the red one and the laser pointer assembly works just fine so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to show you how to use one of the infrared ones and laser diode host the first thing to do is to take off the two outer tops of plastic which protrude a little bit out of the top and then to carefully remove the plastic block on the top after you do that you have to make some changes to your host and here's what I did so I used one of these and what I did was I just fit the laser diode right in the middle I also used a bunch of solder to plug up the hole and then I filed that flat so it made good thermal connection to the back of the laser diode and here's my way ring in the back let's see how well it works I'm gonna run this laser diode out of 130 million just like I did with the other ones figures so far it seems to be working pretty good I'm gonna run this laser diode out about 130 million just like I did with the other ones because so far it seems to be working pretty good that idea don't work hey that's good oh yeah that'll do real nicely too before you go play with some laser diodes of your own there's just a couple of important things I'm going to cover really quick the first thing is if you're gluing your laser diodes to anything I highly recommend getting a fan like this what it does it is it keeps air flow going past the laser diode window or if it's an open County laser die itself and prevents them from being damaged from any chemicals that are outgassing or any solvents that are in your glue secondly the current ratings about 130 million for your infrared CD burning laser diode or 180 milliamps for your DVD burning laser diode are just see lower safe ranges many of these laser diodes can go up to higher currents and most importantly I hope you enjoyed this video and I hope you learned something as always stay tuned for more

Channel: Zenodilodon

Views: 69,249

Keywords: Bare&Basic CD and DVD burning lasers, How to make a Infrared or red burning laser, How to use a CD or DVD laser, Finding and using burning laser diodes, DIY CD or DVD bunring laser, How to make a laser from optical drive, Different types of CD and DVD laser diodes, Using CD DVD lasers, DVD, CD, Burning, Laser, Diode, How, DIY, Laser Diode form factors

Id: pjXMNA3OEkk

Length: 66min 37sec (3997 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 22 2019