Complete 532nm Green Ebay Laser Pointer Teardown + Optical Mod Q&A

today on Xena Gilligan well hello there it looks like they're judging by a recent mouse-click that you perform you have some questions and interests in the green laser pointers sold on eBay well come on in I'll answer all your questions for you in this video all right so what are the main questions that I have is how to take apart one of these cheap green eBay lasers and there's no easy way to do this there really isn't they're all best fitting and the result is normally I have to pull out the modules just by taking the aluminum off the actual laser module and this isn't what you want to do if you actually want to rebuild your pointer so with that said I'm gonna show you my tactic now first thing you have is this front cover which can be metal or plastic and that front cover can just be pulled off I do recommend putting some tape or something between your tool and the front cover if you want to save this I'll be using this for parts so I'm not really too concerned with saving it so I'm gonna rock the front cover off all right then you decide you have the collimating lens so you see the color meeting lens on the top is held on by a little piece of plastic and I'll be holding that and I'll be turning the laser pointer so that the lens comes out of the assembly just like that so now you get this bigger dot I pull it up you'll see this figure and right push it down so they get smaller I'm gonna go ahead and take off the battery section and this is what we're stuck with which is the front piece of the laser assembly and this is the hardest thing to try to work with an extraction tool it's actually pretty easy to make however you'll have to sacrifice one green laser pointer to make one now I recommend that if you're getting into lasers and modifying them to purchase more than one laser pointer simply because it always is a good idea to have more than one so with that said how it is this extractor tool work and where do you get it from if you look at the laser assembly side by side you'll see on the bottom it's that one piece of the laser diode case that is used so on the bottom you'll see where the laser diode gets pressed in and you'll need to get a drill bit and then grill it out so it's wider once you have that done this one has been used but you'll get a screw and you'll put that screw in there and then you'll have to find a nut put that on there as well once again this has been used many times so have to put that down in the vise put it together again we had this year again all right so that's Z Road I want to measure the laser here and you can see it's about 13 millimeters and I'm going to show you the extraction tool and you'll notice it's about 12 millimeters so it helps to have your extraction tool thinner so that way it slides into the front of the laser assembly so let's get the laser assembly out and put the extraction tool inside of the hollow thing all right let's get ready to work on this I'm gonna take this back up off the glass here and work with it back on the wood if you choose to make a diode extraction tool like I have try to avoid using aluminum some laser pointers are made with this piece in aluminum and it's not so structurally as sturdy as brasses so it can make for a very poor diode extraction tool the problem is this the threads are quite easy to rip out and that can cause problems now on to the part nobody likes first step is to secure the wig there housing in a vise like this and from that point things get interesting now this won't always work but this is one of the most reliable methods let's get to it when I start off and you want to place the pliers along the base of the laser pointer is evenly as you can to avoid crushing the case and then apply downward pressure on it this will start to lift the case off the laser module you know at one point you're gonna hit the laser housing side wall and you're gonna want to be careful then around your housing because you're liable to slip off the tube also slide this down a little bit more onto the wool better grip on it alright now I like to keep that in there as much as I can because it's also going to help structurally support the outside of the laser modules tube as well so you don't compress that and screw that up all right now at this point yeah the module and we have a lens there you go it was a real quick test to see if it works though yep all right now I'll tell you something about these lasers a lot of these lasers now come with a board like this and if you look at the board you'll see that there is no adjustable potentiometer on here at all so these lasers cannot be Pat modded you know I don't recommend pop modding I do use these drivers and I do know where to put the potentiometer to modify these drivers if you want to learn more about that I'm going to be doing a how to build a burning laser with every form factor of DVD burning diodes I'll pop up some of those pictures at the video as a teaser I've also included a place in the video where I have modified one of these modules and if you look carefully maybe you can figure it out by yourself until then to continue on with this video I am now going to break down a couple of these modules and perform a mod that I've performed a while back on one of these modules and I want to help answer a couple of questions that you may have on these TPS s laser pointer modules so from here you can see that there's two main parts C laser optical assembly and the driver board for now we're not gonna really worry about the driver board opened until then we're gonna worry about the optical assembly here on the front now there's a little black piece of plastic that I had you remove out earlier and it's a two piece assembly and it's just this threaded piece of plastic here that houses a lens in the front it's basically a small collimating lens and in the modification that I did I do not recommend using one of these I'll explain to you more about that later on but if your sailor binder gets fuzzy or dirty this is usually the culprit you can see there's a couple of scratches on this one just because I removed it I don't normally use these lenses for anything in their plastic so to me they're a disposable item but usually this is a culprit and what you have to clean when your laser pointer gets blurry all right I'm gonna remove the housing here and this outside house is essentially what keeps the laser pointer module in the two slides serrated on the outside and it slides in if you look inside of your laser tube you'll often see where the module was slid into the tube and on the top of that you have a couple of other parts and that is an expanding lens and what it does is it expands to be mount wider so that way the distance between the MCSA and the colony digging lens it can be greatly reached here I have two laser module side by side the one on the bottom still has the expanding lens on it the other one no longer does I'm gonna turn off the light and show you what role the expanding lens plays in the assembly if you see then I have to back here I'll put it on a piece of black I have two dots and as I draw the laser away you'll see that the one with the expanding lens gets bigger much quicker than the other one does so the laser beam can be collimated when it's about two millimeters wide now if you notice that with the expanding lens it gets about two millimeters at that point without the expanding lens it gets to two millimeters about a foot and a half away which is a little long for a laser pointer let's see some others beam profiles with a little bit of fog under the expanding lens is the brass assembly containing the monolithic crystalline assembly I'm gonna pull that piece off on the side of the monolithic crystalline assembly you'll notice that there is kind of a pinkish reflection that comes off which is a AR coating for the infrared band and on the side that the pump diode enters into you'll see that it's a bit of a green coating on the other side and this basically keeps the green laser light from being reflected back into the pump diode the monolithic crystalline assemblies where all the magic happens and in most diagrams this is abbreviated MCA inside the crystal assembly there are actually two main parts first of all the dark green crystal which is a neo diem dope it's real or Theo van and a-pumping crystal and this takes 808 nanometer laser light and converts it over to ten hundred and sixty-four nanometers the second crystal which is a whitish clear crystal is potassium titanium phosphate this is a doubling crystal under a microscope you can see where the infrared light enters in the neon dope it's your ortho van and a crystal a small color change happens there on the whitish crystal the potassium cation phosphate you'll notice a bright green coming out you once you've taken off the monolithic crystalline assembly from your pump diode you'll notice these two types of configurations usually quite common the configuration on the left side is one that uses an open can diode the one on the right side is one that uses a small lens inside and this is a condensing lens it's a lens says a by convex lens and this lens ensures that most of the laser light that comes off the pump diode enters correctly into the monolithic crystalline assembly here are the four pieces in the laser bumped out assembly you have the big-top aluminum host and on the bottom you'll see the other three pieces which contain the expanding lens which goes in first followed by a little compression spring which holds the lens against the front of the host followed by the laser diode and the laser diode is actually basically what holds everything together once the assembly is pressed together in the assembly this one uses a regular laser diode which has a little dust cover window on the top so who wants to see what this looks like under a microscope raise our hand oh I see you there in the back yeah let's go do that inside of the laser diode canister lies the heart of the laser the laser diode itself which is a small block right here here I'm using a camera that is capable of seeing infrared light the other camera isn't so what I'm gonna do at this point is I'm gonna hook up the laser module and I'm gonna turn it on you'll see that it makes green laser light turn off the light once again we get that nice green laser light coming out of that area so what I'm going to do now on this assembly is I'm going to pop off the monolithic crystalline assembly and this is the part that a lot of people got mad at me for because their green laser pointer in the mod that I posted up no longer put out laser light that they could see let's see what this camera sees so you see this big bar right here that big bar is actually infra red in the 808 nanometer range and that laser light puts out anywhere from 80 to 150 milliwatts of IR laser light now this is much brighter than the 5 philip watts that you normally get out of the laser and a lot of videos post up about how dangerous this light is now this light is not only dangerous because of it output power but because you don't see it very well so if it does get in your eyes you won't blink and this will cause prolonged damage because you won't react to it a common question that was asked when I launched the ethical mad video was can I use the original lens this is the original lens that came from the laser pointer without any modifications you can see inside of there that it's the raw pumpkin assembly I'm gonna put that lens on and as you can see yes it does some burning so I also advised people to use either a red blue or purple laser lens let me explain to you why you look at here when the laser is assembled the laser pomp diode assembly is over here the lenses way out there I want to use this as a little notepad so you got a laser diode and it puts out light like this and if you have a lens way out here and this is why I need to be focused the lens is it's not very very wide so it catches the long rays that come out and a lot of those rays get lost along the side a little rough drawing here little light drawing and only a few of those rays end up getting collimated and the rest of it gets lost on the laser tube in the video I advise people to use a lens that was made for blue red or pilot lasers and this is because the lens shape is different so we're gonna take the same laser diode I'm gonna draw the same lines coming out of the laser diode now we're going to put the red blue or violet line this closer and this lens has a much more curved area on both sides it's also much closer to the laser diode so that means that it's able to collect a lot more of the light and collimate the light that comes off the pump diode so using one of those lenses is highly preferred let me show you the effect that it has on the power output this is a lens that I took from a violet laser and mounted it into a plastic mx9 threaded lens it's nine millimeters and so is the outside area of this so I have found that this fits in perfectly on the outside I have cut the tube off and I have done that because you can see that it's a narrow hole in there whereas now the tube is wider once that lens holding piece is cut off let's put this into the module now now as you notice right away it's that's much closer to the laser diode and I'm going to thread it in so you see how the power is affected so you can see that there is a lot more power now coming out of that laser assembly compared to using the regular lens that came with the laser pointer there's a lot more power coming out maybe three four times as much maybe more but that is why I advise using that lens this puts out a lot of energy and you can buy one of these lasers for literally less than two dollars so if you want a burning laser this is the cheapest way it does not involve pot modding I do not recommend pot money because it will ruin your laser diode the last thing I want to cover in this video is that some people asked if it was possible to turn their lasers greenback after doing the optical nod yes it is I'm going to show you how to do that with this laser now so I'm going to take just a small amount of superglue and I'm gonna put it around the edge not too much you want to really minimize the amount of superglue that you use take off some of that actually and then you take Z and when it looks at crystalline assembly and you can simply glue that right back on to your laser it will take a little bit of time to find the sweet spot but it is completely possible so I'm gonna line that up and I'm gonna start turning this time no see if we get green light at a certain point nope why you're came disconnected again no I'm double duty there we go so you can see some green laser light coming out of there ready let me go ahead and turn off the light so after you've got that in position you simply take a small tip tool and carefully work the glue around the outside and by this point some of it should be set if that's said enough now you'll also want to make sure that it is centered as well by central I mean that it lines up with the collimating lens in the front so we're gonna put that all into the assembly that way your camera I'm done again so you can see it's all lined out now this is a very important step especially if you're handling things like super glue and plastic lenses and so is ventilation so I am going to clamp this down into the vise and I'm going to put this little fan right by it and this will give me a little bit of breeze to keep the air flowing stick my fingers in the fan the air flowing across the surface of the diode or the surface of the module well I glue it together and that just makes sure that no frosting effect happens on the assembly as it goes together my next really big video project as I release shorter videos is to make a detailed video on how to take any type of laser diode from my DVD burning laser and make it into a red laser pointer and as you can see there are many different types of laser diodes out there in that video I'll be showing you a lot of close-up pictures and how these Styles look and the wiring inside of those laser diodes so that way you can identify some of those parts inside the laser diodes yourself and wire them up to any project you have here are some pictures this one is an open can style diode and the other two are super multi drive laser diodes which are specialty form factor until I get that video up I hope you enjoyed this one and you know what to do until then stay tuned for more

Channel: Zenodilodon

Views: 410,369

Keywords: How to take apart, green, Laser, Teardown, 532nm, ebay, pointer, optical, mod, hack, How does a, work, Q&A, parts, what is, How tokae apart a green laser pointer, DIY, Burning, What's inside a green laser pointer, Howto

Id: COSNOQihKP0

Length: 23min 26sec (1406 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 13 2018