Hi! In this video I'm going to
play with my first show laser. This little cube called the LaserCube was
donated to my channel by Wicked Lasers. This is way more complicated than
the laser pointers I'm used to handle but still easy to use. I will try to show you a fraction
of what it can do how it works, and even apply
some science to test the lasers in it. Show lasers are meant to be seen but make sure that noone ever
will be able to look directly into the beam or specular reflections of it. Don't let the LaserCube's tiny size fool you. This is a Class 4 laser - the highest
laser hazard class there is. So use laser safety goggles when
burning and popping with a steady beam. You'll see what I mean later... Let's start with a closer look
on the laser before firing it up. It is a small, heavy 10 cm cube. It feels rock-solid. Everything but the
on/off button is made of metal. Thick metal. All six sides are 3 millimeter thick
making it seem overbuild but I guess it is necessary as one big heatsink
to cool the powerful lasers and electronics inside it. Very nice build quality. We live in a plastic world so it's just nice
to feel thick, cold metal like this for once. But it is of course the components
inside the cube, that is the most interesting. There are three lasers inside it. A red, green and blue - making
this a full-color RGB-laser. At the time of this recording,
the LaserCube isn't released yet but I've been told that the lasers in it are as powerful
as the bigger 1 watt LaserDock already available. That's quite a lot of photonic
power for such a small show laser. Could this be real? Luckily, with the kind help from my patrons I have bought a laser power meter,
so we can test it! Thanks to all my patrons for making this possible! It is not recommended to fire a focused,
powerful beam onto the sensor. The laser can burn the needed coating on the sensor. So at first I mounted a focusing lens on the laser. After the focal point,
the beam will be spread wider lowering the power density,
making it less destructive. I'm using the free software LaserOS
from Wicked Lasers to control the laser. For a steady beam at full power needed
here, the pop program is the most fun. Except it will only fire at full power
for a limited time for safety's sake. It reached 727 milliwatts. Not bad as it was clearly still climbing
when the program turned the laser off. Still, I would like to go higher. The program will not let me fire for longer,
but some power is also lost with the extra lens. Here, you can see a lot of light
being reflected by the lens. Light, that never reach the sensor. After some calculations I convinced myself that the sensor could cope with
the focused beam for a short time. I don't recommend doing this, but here we go! With the power meter calibrated for 450 nm
- the strongest, single wavelength from the LaserCube - it reached 855 mW. At a more central 540 nm for all wavelengths it reached 871 mW and was
clearly still climbing fast. If the lasers and power sensor
were given more time to heat up and we account for the inevitable loss
in the internal optics of the show laser I believe the lasers perform to spec.
Nice! Just under 1 watt may not
sound like much, but it's intense. I will shut up and let the laser speak for itself... Show lasers will never replace
true laser cutters and engravers. The beam from a show laser
is hitting the target at an angle. But it is always fun to burn stuff with a laser and I hope this gives you an idea
of how powerful this cube is. I even managed to burn a spot
in my lightly-colored wallpaper with the beam turned on way too long
in a balloon-popping test. Woops... Now, how do they manage to combine three lasers to one powerful and colorful beam
and move it around like this? If you have ever played around with
laser pointers of different colors you know it is fairly easy to point them
at the same spot to mix their colors. Here, I use a red and a green one to make a yellow dot. But it's not a yellow beam. This seems physically impossible to make since the lasers need to be in
the exact same place - at the same time - pointing in the same direction. You can of course point the
lasers directly at each other or make them reflect into each other. I suck at it handheld, but you get the point... However, it will overheat the lasers and can't be used
to project the combined beam away from the lasers. The red laser even turns off
when the green one hits it directly. So how do they combine THREE laser beams inside the show laser? The trick is special mirrors called dichroic mirrors. I have two large examples here - a red and a green one. In short: These let one color pass
but reflect the other visible colors. That's exactly what we need to combine the beams. Here are two examples. There's only a tiny window into the LaserCube but it's enough to see the optics used. They combine the three laser
beams using two dichroic mirrors and then move the beam using two scanners. Let me use a diffraction grating to
visualize how they achieve different colors. Actually, with the diffraction grating out let's quickly test the
wavelengths of the three lasers. As shown in my previous video the wavelengths will increase
a little as the laser heats up. But it looks like the LaserCube uses
the same wavelengths as the LaserDock. All right, with all this optical trickery the LaserCube will project
a ton of different shows. It would take hours to go through all the possibilities. In stead, I suggest you download the free
software to an Android device and try it yourself. On the screen you can see
what the laser would project. Even without the laser. Just search for LaserOS on Google Play. I must admit I am impressed by how much they
managed to cram into this tiny enclosure. Did I mention, that it even has a battery inside it?!? So all you need for a laser show anywhere is the LaserCube, an Android
smartphone and a USB-cable. I will update the description under the video
as more details about the LaserCube are released. Thanks to all my patrons! I finally have a laser power meter
and I owe it all to you. This opens new possibilities and
will improve my future laser videos. Thank you so much! And of course thanks to Wicked Lasers
for sending me the LaserCube. It is just a dream to have a portable
plug-and-play show laser running on battery. Easy and quick to set up - yet very capable. Bravo! Thank you for watching.
Bye for now.
