How To Turn a Mini Maglite Into a Laser

Lucas123 writes "Using the laser from a DVD burner, this instructional video shows you how to create a hand-held laser that is powerful enough to light a match and pop a balloon. There's some soldering involved and the Maglite's bulb housing needs to be drilled out to fit the new laser diode, but with some basic skill, most people could do this. Just plain cool." Update: 07/09 12:23 GMT by KD : Warning, the device that results from following these instructions will blind you if you look into it.

Uhhh...

So basically you're not making a laser, you're just moving a laser from a drive into a flashlight case.

Re:Uhhh...

Yes, thank you for repeating the article summary.

Dangerous

What the article doesn't, and should say:

This is a very dangerous toy

IT WILL BLIND YOU IMMEDIATELY IF:

- You look at it
- You shine it on a reflective surface that shines it back into your eye

No joke, people. Don't try this at home. I'd actually argue that this video is irresponsible since it does not mention the dangers of the item being built at any point. It will probably be uploaded on Youtube and a lot of innocent, curious kids will end up with one fewer eye as a result of this video.

DO NOT USE UNSAFE LASERS WITHOUT WEARING THE APPROPRIATE PROTECTIVE GEAR (special goggles can be obtained for specific wavelengths, which will ensure that you cannot see the laser - and hence it can't hurt you).

Daniel (who was paying attention during the Physics Dept 'laser safety' lecture)

Re:Dangerous

Apologies for replying to my own comment...

TO EDITORS: PLEASE ADD SAFETY WARNING TO THE ARTICLE SUMMARY!
This is an irresponsibly dangerous video with no safety warning.

Re:Dangerous

Pfft, it's "just plain cool" - ain't no way it can be unsafe!

Next week on /. - how to convert your BB gun to fire 9mm rounds!

Re:Dangerous

Actually, if the little turds use one of these modified pointers, you can easily find and pound their asses.

Jacking up the power like this make the ENTIRE BEAM visible, not just the point.

I still want a laser powerful enough to deface bumper stickers and write insults into the paint on cars...

Re:Dangerous

Jacking up the power like this make the ENTIRE BEAM visible, not just the point.

Visible means little when you're blind.

Re:Dangerous

I'm increasingly of the opinion that the only proper way to pounish somone who intentionally wounds/maims someone is to do the same thing to them. Only withplenty of warning so they have time to get really fucking scared. No other punishment really means anything in the end.

And therefore, you will apply the same theorem to teeth???

Re:Dangerous

You mean to teach people with such crippled intellect and no social or emotional control that they would take from or harm people for their own fun ... well to teach them that there is no consequence to their actions? Good idea, that'll stop them.

Please, pull your head out of your ass. The lack of oxygen is causing brain damage. You are confusing a nice ideas with the reality of human nature. There will always be asshats who don't and won't care about others, will take from others or harm others to satisfy their own pleasures, and only avoid these avenues when they cause discomfort for themselves. So good idea, let's remove consequences for bad behaviour.

Re:Dangerous

Which is pretty much the way it used to work. But nowadays, it's equal treatment for all, equal rights for all, no matter how they treated others or how they trampled the rights of others, the nanny state will protect them all!!

I'm with you. Beat and then neuter the fuckers.

Warning.

Visible means little when you're blind.

Warning: Do not look into LASER with remaining eye.

Re:Dangerous

Next week on /. - how to convert your BB gun to fire 9mm rounds!

You do realise that this can be done to certain models? Here are some links :)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/ne ws/2003/01/05/ngun105.xml [telegraph.co.uk]
http://www.criminal-information-agency.com/firearm s_record.php?id=8 [criminal-i...agency.com]

Re:Why use a BB gun?

FOURTH SAFETY WARNING: YOU COULD EVEN YOUR EYE OUT DOING THIS!

So it's a cure for being crosseyed? Someone get Navin R. Johnson on the phone!

Re:Dangerous

No problem. He just need to wait until a reply gets modded up +5 Informative. That's a sure way to guarantee that anything posted on Slashdot will be accurate, with correct precision, and not be filled with crackpot theories, right?

Re:Dangerous

All you have to do is watch it through a fish tank. If a beam comes back at you, it would just difuse or refract in the watter. There is a bonus if it hits the fish.

Re:Dangerous

CD burners are 780-800 nm, in the IR. DVD's are 660, in the red. Blu-Ray are 405 nm, in the deep blue range. For CD and Blu-ray, welding goggles with a #5 shade would be adequate (complete IR and 10,000x visible attenuation) but for this laser you'd want something that had an OD of more like 7-10 in the red range. A good pair of glasses intended for helium-neon lasers or ruby lasers would probably work, but there are safety glasses intended specifically for these diodes, supplied to people who make them. Expect to pay about $350+ new, but ebay has laser safety goggles for cheaper. But get the technical specs on anything you buy used.

Re:Dangerous

The editors cannot change the article as they have killed themselves with their new maglite lasers....

Re:Dangerous

I nearly blinded myself. I work with lasers, and was trying to align one of the mirrors. I misaligned one slightly, causing the beam to shine in my eye. I looked away immediately, but could only see darkness in that eye. I was so shit scared.

I was in a foreign country. The company I worked for rushed me to hospital and this foreign doctor explains to my collegues that she needs to inject a needle in behind the back of my eye. You need to prevent the back of the eye from bruising and swelling up.

She takes out her book of english and says slowly "This will..... hurt". And it did.

Thankfully after 2 weeks my eyesight was back to normal.

So please everyone - do be very careful. And if anything happens, it is _vital_ to get to a _eye_ hospital as soon as possible.

Re:Dangerous

this foreign doctor explains to my collegues that she needs to inject a needle in behind the back of my eye.

She takes out her book of english and says slowly "This will..... hurt".

Thank you for giving me tonight's horrible nightmare.

If I wet the bed, I'm sending you the laundry bill.

Re:Dangerous

Oh yeah? How much does it cost to hang the sheets out on the line to dry?

Re:Dangerous

Your idea of cleaning piss stains off of sheets is hanging the sheets out to dry? I think you misunderstood what your mom meant when she said she liked having crisp sheets on the bed.

Re:Dangerous

If you liked that, here's a charming story from Laser Focus, August 1977.

When the beam struck my eye I heard a distinct popping sound, caused by a laser-induced explosion at the back of my eyeball. My vision was obscured almost immediately by streams of blood floating in the vitreous humor, and by what appeared to be particulate matter suspended in the vitreous humor. It was like viewing the world through a round fishbowl full of glycerol into which a quart of blood and a handful of black pepper have been partially mixed. There was local pain within a few minutes of the accident, but it did not become excruciating. The most immediate response after such an accident is horror. As a Vietnam War Veteran, I have seen terrible scenes of human carnage, but none affected me more than viewing the world through my bloodfilled eyeball. In the aftermath of the accident I went into shock, as is typical in personal injury accidents.

As it turns out, my injury was severe but not nearly as bad as it might have been. I was not looking directly at the prism from which the beam had reflected, so the retinal damage is not in the fovea. The beam struck my retina between the fovea and the optic nerve, missing the optic nerve by about three millimeters. Had the focused beam struck the fovea, I should have sustained a blind spot in the center of my field of visions. Had it struck the optic nerve, I probably would have lost sight of that eye.

The beam did strike so close to the optic nerve, however, that it severed nerve-fiber bundles radiating from the optic nerve. This has resulted in a crescent-shaped blind spot many times the size of the lesion.

The diagram is a Goldman-Fields scan of the damaged eye, indicating the sightless portions of my field of view four months after the accident. The small blind spot at the top exists for no discernible reason; the lateral blind spot is the optic nerve blind spot. The effect of the large blind area is much like having a finger placed over one's filed of vision. Also, I still have numerous floating objects in the field of view of my damaged eye, although the blood streamers have disappeared. These `floaters' are more a daily hindrance than the blind areas, because the brain tries to integrate out the blind area when the undamaged eye is open. There is also recurrent pain in the eye, especially when have been reading too long or when I get tired.

This was caused by a reflection from an infrared laser beam of fairly low power (a 10 ns pulse totalling 6 millijoules). Note that the researcher wasn't actually looking directly at the reflection... the reflected beam was just in his field of vision and directed toward one of his eyes. So for those people who think 'not looking at the beam' is an adequate safety procedure... it isn't.

Re:Dangerous

For what it's worth, my laser was 30nm pulse of about 3 mJ at 440nm (blue).

Re:Dangerous

My contact lenses block the government mind control frequency being sent through the television.

Re:MOMMY!

It's important to be made aware of the mind control tactics used by our government. The only problem I've had with them is that I'm not sure if the contact lenses work or not.

That's why you should just stick with tin foil. Everyone knows that works. Believe me, if the government mind control was working on me, I'd know about it! But I have to go now -- I like to get my quarterly estimated income taxes paid nice and early.

Re:Dangerous

This is a very dangerous toy

IT WILL BLIND YOU IMMEDIATELY IF:

- You look at it
- You shine it on a reflective surface that shines it back into your eye

Pussy.

I've got one sitting right here on my desk, and I can shine it in to my eyes with absolutely no problems. Allow me to demonstrate...

Srr?

Sbao;utelu ni orpbkens,

Re:Dangerous

This is a very dangerous toy

IT WILL BLIND YOU IMMEDIATELY

Humbug! All my life they have been telling me masturbation does the same exact thing.

Re:Dangerous

It will probably be uploaded on Youtube and a lot of innocent, curious kids will end up with one fewer eye as a result of this video.

Yes, but on the bright side the eye patches will help identify the willing-to-do-anything children at a distance, and we need more pirates anyway.

- RG>

Re:Dangerous

I think the point here is that a little itty bitty laser diode doesn't seem intrinsically dangerous to a lot of people. A knife, for some reason, is easier to understand that it can and will cut you if it is mishandled. But a little self-education on the dangers of a knife generally doesn't result in blindness.

The only saving grace in this article and video is that the beam will hopefully not be that well collimated over a longer distance and when idiots shine it at other people, the damage will be less and the people will have time to look away before they get serious damage.

Also, a laser like this would probably leave lines or dots burned into the retina. It isn't as bad as a pulsed laser that can literally rip the retina off the back wall of the eye because of what are essentially sonic booms in the eye due to the fast rise times and heating pulses. But if it can burn a hole in a piece of paper, imagine what it can do to all your rods and cones when your eye focusses the beam into an even smaller and more intense spot in your eye.

I agree with all the other posters who say the video should be removed and that this article should be pulled.

Re:Dangerous

I agree with all the other posters who say the video should be removed and that this article should be pulled.

I was with you all the way on your comment until you said that.

Removing the article (or the video) won't make this go away, a clear warning however might at least stop some people from getting hurt.

Re:Dangerous

It's not so much the idiots blinding themselves, as a previous poster pointed out. It's them blinding everyone else around them that's more worrying. You know, the ones that bring laser points to movie theaters? One malicious person could go to the front and start randomly shining it over the crowd.

Re:Uhhh...

How funny, I was reading this post and happened to see this at exactly the same time:

"Bureaucrat Conrad, you are technically correct. The best kind of correct." [imdb.com]

Re:Uhhh...

Yeah, but now you can put it on sharks!

Sounds like fun.

Know what I'm doing this weekend :) now if only this could be modified for Laser tag

Re:Sounds like fun.

Just tape balloons to people in strategic spots, I guess.

This is cool, but can it...

actually ignite a match like that? I didn't know that 2 AA batteries could put out that much power in a laser beam... this is clearly a lot more powerful than your standard run-of-the-mill laser pointer used in presentations. I'm so tempted on doing this.

Cool isn't the word...

The problem isn't the current draw - it is the heat. The big laser pointers tend to ensure there is better thermal coupling to the case so the waste heat is removed. With this, it will tend to heat up the module until pssst... and your laser is dead. Should be ok for less than a minute or so.

Re:Sure

Green lasers can put out more energy because of their design in general. Now from the demo, it looks like this red diode is more powerful than the ones normally used in laser pointers, not sure on its power. I don't know what the maximum is, but it is in the 100s of mW. I don't know about the orange or blue diodes, haven't really looked at them. The problem is that they are rather expensive so I don't think you'll want to buy them. D batteries have the same voltage as A batteries, just more storage capacity. So using those will make it last longer. As a practical matter, the voltage you feed it needs to be whatever it was designed to take, so if 3 volts is what is called for, do not go over or under that, you'll probably just screw up your stuff.

One thing to note though is that green laser are more complicated. There isn't actually a single diode that does green, rather it is an IR light that's generated and then frequency doubled to make green. In fact one would probably get more energy per square mm by simply using the IR output. Of course that is even more dangerous since you can't see IR and thus could be lasing your eyes and not know it.

Before you do this, note three things:

1) You can buy lasers over 5mW commercially. Just search Google for it, it isn't illegal or anything.

2) To own and operate any laser over 5mW requires a license. You are responsible for getting it from the FDA.

3) Messing with high power lasers (and yes over 5mW is high power in the laser world) is rather dangerous. That's why there's the limits. If you have a 100+mW laser, which is around what you'd need to light a match, even the reflected light could damage your vision permanently if you hit your eye. Given that you don't seem to know much bout lasers, best not to fuck around with this. Consider that the sun provides about 1000 watts per square meter to the earth, and that looking right at it will damage your sight in a few minutes if you aren't protected. That works out to about 1mW per square mm. So take a laser, who's dot is only around a square mm or two, then consider its power. Yes, it really is brighter than the sun. When you are talking about some of these high power 3B lasers, they are MANY times brighter than the sun. Don't play with powerful lasers until you learn about them.

Re:Sure

As I said in another post, DVD burning uses lasers rated for over 200 mW. You can buy a DVD burner for under $40 and strip out the laser, or you can often buy replacement/repair carriages for burners on ebay for even less.

I haven't yet seen a straight green laser diode -- mine are all frequency doubled. However, many new green LED's are created using silicon nitride, essentially being blue lasers that emit at a longer wavelength, and it's not clear to me why they couldn't do the same thing with a blue diode.

Lasing your eyes with IR sucks, but not as bad as with visible, because the front of your eye is mostly (*mostly*) opaque to IR so you'll just fry your cornea, which can be replaced. Visible will go through the eye optics system, get even more focussed, and fry holes in your retina, which is not repairable. I've worked with people who have gotten big blasts of UV, IR, and green, and only the people who got hit with green had blind spots in their vision. The others had to wear glasses or have lens/cornea replacements, but they had reasonable vision despite that.

Great...

Now when I go to the movies, instead of worrying about Brad Pitt having a red dot on his face, I have to worry about the screen igniting. Good times.

Re:Great...

You know they're gonna solve that before we have kids.

Tiny Violin: Poor kids never know the simple pleasure of the laser :(

Re:Great...

You know they're gonna solve that before we have kids.

At /. it's like saying "You've got a better chance winning the lottery though..."

Careful with this thing.

In the words of Rainier Wolfcastle:

My eyes! The goggles do nothing!

yeah baby

So where did I put those frikin sharks?

Shark

Ok, so where do I get the shark ? and where is the manual on how to mount it on the shark ?

Re:Shark

and where is the manual on how to mount it on the shark ?

Mounting the laser could be a slight problem if the shark is conscious

Re:Shark

Mounting the laser could be a slight problem if the shark is conscious

Just turn the shark upside down before mounting, that makes it go into tonic immobility for about 20 minutes.

Re:Shark

Ew! Ick! TMI man, TMI.

Re:Shark

Turning the shark upside down could be a slight problem if the shark in conscious

Re:Shark

Just turn the shark upside down before turning it upside down, that makes it go into tonic immobility for about 20 minutes.

Re:Shark

and where is the manual on how to mount it on the shark ?

mount -t lamniformesh /dev/laser shark

To repeat an old warning

"Do not look into Laser with remaining eye!"

Re:To repeat an old warning

With a 245mW laser, that should be modded informative, not funny. It is strong enough that it can cause permanent eye damage from a reflection, long before the blink reflex kicks in.