Miniature flexure mirror mounts

[The_Doctor]

You're beam-steering. That's one of the more critical situations requiring small offset errors.

You got the small scale right though, and the reduction of the need for a mirror to send the second laser beam to the cube. A lot of people here have added that for reasons that might best be put down to not thinking it through, as polarisation will be set by the rotation of a diode in a mount. You might be able to scale down further, as your design is working to a 10 mm wide cube. I don't know how much smaller, given a 5mm wide cube, but maybe a 33% reduction, or even more.

I decided against milling mainly because I haven't got a milling machine, and anything I could arrange would still place high demands on machining. I'll be soldering to a copper base plate with low-temp indium based solders. If it's good enough for a Coherent C315M, it's a method that's certainly good enough for me. They actually use a ceramic base plate, but on the scale I'll want, copper will be more than stable enough.

[chad]

I thought about shrinking it more and there is room to do that. The 1cm3 cube is just because I happen to have one. If I make it smaller then I will have the problem of it being able to mount on standard 1"x1" breadboard ( i used this spacing on the breadboard I made).

There is a little under 1/2 inch between the pocket and the top. My hope is I can design the driver pcb to fit in this space so I can't really loose much on the z.

Yea the coherent trick is slick! defiantly a great way to do it!

I swore off laser years ago but like any good addiction I just can't leave it alone.

Chad