Hello! I seem to have accidentally bought a laser....

[WookieBoy]

Oh dear....

It seems you may be right Norty and Dilbert...

Two days past original delivery date now and still no show. Seller has stopped responding to e-mails and all his other sales have disappeared of the face of FleaBay...

It is starting to look a little like it might be too good to be true after all...

Still, I'll give him till the end of the week before I start asking PayPal what's what... You never know, it might just be slow shipping. ;o)

[Picasso]

File the ebay claim NOW!

[allthatwhichis]

File the ebay claim NOW!

+1... +2

[WookieBoy]

UPDATE : -

Well, the unit arrived today! Phew! So no need to Involve PayPal yet...

I fired it up and it works, but as I kind of expected having read a few other posts here about cheap Chinese stuff, the beam alignment is APPALLING!

The Blue is VERY bright.
The green seems ok.
The red however is very dim and about 2 degrees off axis to anything else.

Looking at the front of the unit, I'm not even sure the red beam hits the galvos properly... the front of the unit glows very red when it's lasing so I'm thinking that maybe some of the red beam misses the galvos and is just hitting the internal of the case.

Actually, looking into the front of the unit (switched off obviously!) i'm not even sure they're galvos! Look suspiciously stepper motor like to me...

Definitely a Chinese unit (no surprises there) as the menu is in 'Chinglish'!

No instructions what so ever included and the IEC mains lead doesn't actually fit a UK socket despite looking like it should (I think the earth pin is too big) but not matter as I have bundles of them around.

Will post pictures later once I charge my camera.

Anyone near by (Luton ish) with the kit to measure the outputs and give advice on how to line the diodes up properly? ;o)
I'd be intrigued to see how close to the stated minimum 2,5W the total output actually gets as the green beam looks about the same brightness as my little DJ cousin's 40mW Maplin DJ laser...

Still think it might be better to re-house it in a non moving head box, though I think I'd wait to get everyone else's opinion on whether it's worth it or not once you all see what the internals look like...

Thoughts?? )

[norty303]

Well, at least you got something!

I have quite strong feelings about moving head lasers - in as much as we spend a whole lot of time as lasersists defining safe projection zones, careful beam masking, etc that to put the whole shebang in a moving head, blows all of that out of the water. I know someone who bought some large green MH's and they either spent a lot of time fixed facing forward, or on occasion, when given over to the lighting guy to control via DMX, spent their time firing hot beams around quite randomly.

The money that goes into the mechanics of the head, could be better spent on better optics mounts, scanfail device, scanners, etc (imho)

I think in some scenarios they have their place (like if you wanted to project a butterfly moving around the room or something), but those times are few and far between in my experience.


First things first, take the head apart and take some photos, you'll be in and out of that thing plenty enough, so don't worry about getting stuck in now (unless you planned on returning it!)

[Picasso]

2.5 watts and you should only be able to keep your hand in the unscanned beam for about 3-4 secs. Eye's are hard to judge laser power. Go with the heat and start seeing what each laser feels like, fingers work great for this.

[WookieBoy]

Ok, I've opened it up and had a look inside.

Wiring is a bit of a mess and could do with a few cable ties to keep it in place.

Unsurprisingly, there's huge blobs of what looks like hot melt glue over everything and there seems to be something sticky like dried orange juice or something similar spilt over large parts of the metalwork...

The red is definitely missing it's beam-path for sure. It's hitting the side of the last mirror before the galvos so most of the beam is hitting the casing...

There's a number of pcbs, one of which is covered in black goop so you cant see what's on it other than the connectors...

I've no ILDA equipment yet, but under DMX it seems to be relatively controllable, though it tries to fit far to much on each channel... I might have a go at writing a personality for it on my Avolites desk... then again I might not as I think I'll probably be taking Norty's advice and strip the unit and start again in a new housing.

@Norty - I totally agree with you about the safety issues of a moving head laser... especially as it seems to lase randomly as it calibrated on power-up!

There's plenty of internal beam effects and the usual crap Chinese animations and text on board in the unit, though I think the galvos might need tuning as there seem to be 'lumps' in the corners of any geometric shapes...

I've included a bundle of photos so you can all see what's what... Quality isn't brilliant, but I've no experience photographing lasers and the camera didn't really like it...

I quite like the one of the beam showing through the foam board though!

@Picasso :- Seems to be no heat from the beam when scanning the smallest (almost a point beam) shape it'll do on DMX... Could that be that it's not up to power or that it just has a good IR filter in there somewhere?

Anyway, over to you all for your opinions!

[Picasso]

You wont ever feel much after the scanners start to move it around. Glued in mounts are fun! Some of china DMX stuff has some settings for say....red laser on full for doing set up and such. If you cant find a dmx setting or combo of dip switching just unplug the red lasers ttl or what ever it uses. Get the red up to full power and see if you have a laser fault or its just not aligned.

But those beams look good to get your lase on.

[WookieBoy]

I think it's probably an alignment issue... You can see in the last photo that the red fires out the side of the unit when the lid is off and makes an odd pattern on the wall...

The two photo's before show the final mirror in the beam before the galvos and you can just about see (it's not a great photo) that the red is only half on the mirror at most...

Unfortunately, the laser modules and optics are all sandwiched between two plates with the electronics mounted on the outside, so adjusting it all will mean stripping it down a bit first I think.

As I'm going to end up taking it apart this much, I might look at transferring it all to a better case...

Is there any way to tell from the circuit boards if it's a TTL or analogue unit? I'm guessing it'll be TTL at this price, but I'm open to surprises... After all, it turned up! )

[Picasso]

I think I've seen the red driver before but not potted like yours is. It should have both analog and ttl on it. Id guess it uses ttl now. But looks like yes a few screws to remove first!

I'd keep it all in the current head/case. Find your self a nice case and build up from other parts. Use your current one to try out some of your software options (pangolin, LFX) . If your looking for a case check out this section http://www.photonlexicon.com/forums/...-new-laser-box