Scored a Laserscope YAG!

[mixedgas]

Let me explain one thing. That post may have came off as a bit snooty. The 1500$ is the price so my boss will let me deviate from the company flight/service schedule. He views me as a fragile, but needed asset. I'm not allowed to waste my time. I'm on the road for five to seven days at a time, and I only get about a day and a half for turnaround and exercise. I have a exemption in my contract for show lasers, but he needs to know where I'm at. I'm on call. This might seem restrictive. In fact it is. I might have to jet across country on a few hours notice. But I need certain benefits from this job, and I can no longer survive on glorified grad student wages.

So I'll give you a hint to make up for my tone.

When you do get it, if you get into the service screen, one very frustrating thing will catch you, zeros are actually ones. The inputs from the interlocks and functions are active low, there is a technical reason for this, noise rejection. I don't think you will find that any where on the net. A common cry is "my motherboard must be dead, I have ten zeros and three ones". That is not the case. I picked up the phone the minute I saw zeros, long, long, ago. The response on the other end, was Why did you not check everything electrical, moving, switched, and wet before calling ?." That gentleman had a point. You cannot assume. Well the ones are the issues and the zeros are valid conditional states. A few milliseconds after all those zeros appear, the unit is very dangerous internally.

Hint two: Don't peak the green power without checking everything else in the cavity first. Doubling Crystals (In ANY pulsed laser) do not survive long pulses well. In fact they like short pulses, otherwise they get thermal damage on the surface. It is the inverse of what you would think. There is a reason CW mode is in the low lamp regime.


Steve

[telmnstr]

@dsli_jon:

Yep, I know the equipment needs to have a variance. I'm not sure how much the local FAA director knows about laser shows actually. Most of the activity of the sort here comes from NASA Langley. Other than that, there aren't many shows around here generally. I can't think of ever seeing one with sky beam termination. The first I ever heard of an application was the one a few blocks from my house (multiple 40 watt RGB) but that was at angle and I'm pretty certain in the actual flight path.


I was already looking into using ADS-B to RX the GPS coords of any aircraft but unfortunately not all are pushing location and small craft don't always have those transponders :-(


I gotcha.

The funny thing is yeaaaars ago I owned a Quantel? Quantronix? YAG but I dumped it as no KTP and I wasn't really into marking/cutting then.

I'm not in a huge rush at all. The (unpaid) event I'm helping with is early next year. In the meantime I'm trying to get my RGB projector up to snuff and want to crank out some LSX shows!!!!

I was reading the manual and looking at the schematics (trying to figure out why the iso issue) and noticed that on 1Ø @ 220/240/whatever there is a power drop of some sort. I know the 40-50 watt numbers are pushing it hard, but I'm assuming at lower input power it will probably do 20-25 watts qswitched? I can only assume pushing it hard tears up the lamp quicker as well.

[telmnstr]

Let me explain one thing. That post may have came off as a bit snooty. The 1500$ is the price so my boss will let ...

Steve

Heya no worries. I know how it goes. I think my employer is $170,000+ behind in salary to me and missed another paycheck fairly recently. I said if they did that, resume was going out. It went out a few places and now phone interview next week (I think) with a .com in Northern Virginia. Combined with a few needy hobbies (a/v/music stuff/lasers, pinball machines, scuba diving, etc.) times are a bit tight. But $400 laser scopes FOR THE WIN! Like, you know life is unbalanced when rent for a standard apartment is 3 x 40 watt YAG LASERS a month. You know? I still think it would be cheaper to build houses out of flat panel TVs than wood. But that is for another discussion.

Well the zeros aren't actually ones, it's just that 1s are open interlocks :-)

If the screen said "Laser will fire when all lines are low" or zero or whatever, that would be much better design.

I still need to read up on all of the alignment stuff. When I had the "large frame" argon, every time it was moved it generally had to be re-aligned. Sometimes if it just sat, it had to be re-aligned. Not the case with the 60x, of course. I'm hoping the solid state stuff isn't as bad.

Also, I would hope that it can be all peaked for highest output power with the power down low. Set it up with it low, peak it all, close it up, run the power up?

[mixedgas]

Quote:

"Also, I would hope that it can be all peaked for highest output power with the power down low. Set it up with it low, peak it all, close it up, run the power up? "

End Quote.

Nope. Not at these rep rates. That is a sure path to crystal death. Part of the design is that the 1064 passing through the crystal heats the crystal for stability. There is an oven, but tuning and performance interact differently then the simple, nearly linear, ion system. Laserscope varies the power using extracavity optics. There are high and low lamp settings, and high and low RF. A CW mode is available, but you do not peak the crystal in CW.

You need to do the two power meter alignment technique, and at some moderately high level.

Since your in the Foggy Bottom area, the former national malarial swamp, you need to store the laser in a dry place, for the sake of the optics. Not the less then climate controlled garage. Humidity and condensation attracts dust to the internals. The products I service have the crystals heaters on 24-7. and heaters in the baseplate. We use the more sensitive KD*P, but the concept is the same. A clean, dry, dust free KTP is essential. LASERSCOPE does not use the offline heater concept, so dry storage is a very good idea.

We are trying to tell you that using these is a art form. It needs inspected internally before you fire it up, a dust bunny in the wrong place is very costly. Depending on the model, You may find you need a bar coded or EEPROM based service fiber just to get going. Other units have a few selected resistors mounted in the fiber plug. Its not a easy bypass if any of the interlocked fibers are used. Not all laserscopes use them.

For example, you can't really ever clean the ends of the crystal, you use a puffer (not canned gas or methanol) to remove the dust.

Ion lasers are so tolerant compared to large YAG. Once set up correctly, they work well, but the key word here is correctly.

Any further technical discussion of the device is in PMs or by phone, following the forum's "Laserscope rule"


Steve

[planters]

I can vouch for the need to align the optics for the power level you intend to run. Within reason, the general alignment that wont explode anything is still likely to be less than optimal for PO at any given lamp current setting. I have seen an improvement of 30% within this narrow range. This is because the lamp causes thermal distortions in the rod that change as the current increases and the cavity optics can be adjusted to counter some of this distortion and improve output power.