WL Phosforce

[bshanahan14rulz]

Interesting idea. Can see many opportunities for improvement. The main idea is that this is an attachment for your ~450nm laser. As you might recall, most white LEDs are actually 450nm LEDs with various phosphors to downconvert some of that blue light into other wavelengths to make white light. This device uses a grating to spread out the laser (could have used a lens...), then the multiple beams from the grating hit the phosphor in different spots from behind. White-looking light is emitted and the stuff that goes forward can get focused by the reflector.

Here's a review by a familiar face:
http://laserpointerforums.com/f52/n...osforce-laser-flashlight-converter-82480.html

 

[AnAppleSnail]

Sounds like a great way to emit unattenuated laser* radiation at unsafe levels. There have been a few quiet projects pursuing this on CPF with no reliable way to get the full potential unlocked, safely.

*Edit: High-intensity blue light, rather.

 

[Drtonyt]

It is overpriced and underpowered...

 

[Soulero]

It is overpriced and underpowered...

Exactly. It is WAY less than the claimed power, and you could probably make the same thing for less than $10. Also, their claim that it only works with their lasers is completely untrue, it will work with any 445/450nm laser.

 

[bshanahan14rulz]

Sounds like a great way to emit unattenuated laser* radiation at unsafe levels.

Agreed!

There have been a few quiet projects pursuing this on CPF with no reliable way to get the full potential unlocked, safely.

hmm, I'll have to look for some of these. I've got a few ideas that include some physical safety measures, but I reckon optical feedback would be nice to add too.

*Edit: High-intensity blue light, rather.

< a little bit of both, I'd think. I think the grating doesn't change the divergence of the beam, so you'd still have a collimated laser beam, just it would be lots of little ones, at an nth of the power. N would have to be a darned big number before those little beams become "safe."

 

[fyrstormer]

Using a complex mechanism to generate laser light, then using another complex mechanism to convert it into normal white light, thus eliminating all hard-to-obtain unique qualities of the original laser light, seems like a huge waste of time and resources. With all the intermediate steps between the battery and the lense, there is no way a device like this could be more efficient than a simple white LED. This strikes me as being a Rube Goldberg device.

 

[bshanahan14rulz]

It was already proven that folks who'd shell out that kind of dough for such a dangerous toy wouldn't mind shelling out another $90 so that they can now justify their purchase as providing light for tasks, instead of just producing a dangerous, cool-looking beam.
I don't know what is better at turning electricity into power, I would guess a laser diode might have a slight edge on an LED, but then again, this particular wavelength of LED has to have been researched by so many people that perhaps its maturity may beat the LD's logical edge on LEDs.

 

[2xTrinity]

Sounds like a great way to emit unattenuated laser* radiation at unsafe levels. There have been a few quiet projects pursuing this on CPF with no reliable way to get the full potential unlocked, safely.

*Edit: High-intensity blue light, rather.

Agreed theirs is a poor design. In the event of phosphor failure, blue light will emit directly out of the device. That doesn't necessarily have to be the case though.

I'm about to attempt a project like this in the near future, but using the general idea of a luminescent solar concentrator:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminescent_solar_concentrator

Except instead of using sunlight I will pump the phosphor using 445nm laser light that is spread just enough to keep the phosphor from getting saturated. Laser light would be incident perpendicular to the slab. A beam absorber/beam dump can be placed immediately behind the slab in the event of a phosphor failure. The emitted light is the light-piped to an edge where it can be coupled out and collimated via secondary optics.