I have an 808nm 170W laser from Box Optics (China). I want to control the laser using the pmw values. They don't provide a driver for this. How to control the laser using the ESP32 or Arduino microcontroller.
Is there any cheap way to control the laser? Attaching the datasheet here.
BLD-F808-170-200-22N0 (1).pdf (297.8 KB)
I don't think that LASER is intended for CW operation.
It would dissapate almost 100W of heat.
You need to buy a high power pulsed LASER driver.
With all due respect, but if you need to ask how to operate this, you should really reconsider if you want to embark on this in the first place. There are several ways in which this can go wrong and a good number of them involve serious injury, potentially irreversible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMCccX1Uuh0&t=101s. Wanted to do something like this.
We would have like a liquid cooling plate in place. I wanted to burn weeds on the farm.
Do you have 2-3 years to do the necessary R&D and >$100k to burn on test equipment? If no, consider a different solution.
What you're seeing in the YouTube video seems quite simple, but it's way beyond the scope of a regular hobby project.
If you're serious about this, forget about the powerful IR laser for now and build a test setup with an ordinary low-power diode from a laser pointer. Once you get that to work, reliably, without the risk of 'leaking' the beam outside the boundaries of the system, start thinking about the power electronics.
I worked with 20W blue lasers. Was thinking to upgrading to this one.
It's fiber coupled. The fiber is only 200micrometers in diameter. That is not what you want.
Plus I'm not sure 808nm is the best wavelength for burning weeds.
That video mentions nothing about the LASER only the gimbal system
there is a paper in the description, it tells that, 810nm 90W.
I was thinking to add a collimator of 2mm diameter spot size. I tried 450nm range but become really expensive I feel.
Sounds good.
Back to the original question about the driver. I still think your best option is to buy one, otherwise you will need to design and build a custom PCB.
Any suggestions on the driver ? Do you think these mosfet drivers or motor drivers would work?
Definitely not!
I have no suggestions other than to search for a pulsed LASER driver that can supply at least 12A with a compliance voltage of around 40V
What was wrong with the 40W blue LASER set-up?
40W Blue laser setup. beam quality is not good and takes longer to burn.
Well I'm no expert on weed burning, but since most weeds are green, I would think that more of the LASER power is absorbed by the weed with a blue LASER than with an IR LASER.
I don't think I can provide any additional useful help.
This will be offset by overall power efficiency of the entire setup, which will likely be higher for an IR laser given a semiconductor laser topology.
Moreover, that's just the story for the 'green' bit; i.e. chlorophyll. What happens at the UV and IR sides of the spectrum can be a whole different story - again speaking in terms of total efficiency (how much 'burn' you get per Watt input).
Well, green and red are complementary colors so, maybe a red laser would be better.
The psychology of color has little to do with it. This is about absorption spectra on the plant side, and electrical efficiency in turning amperes into photons on the laser side.
No disrespect; just highlighting that terms like "complementary colors" are tricky when it comes to physics, since such constructs are intertwined with subjective human perception.
If you look at a wavelength spectrum, you'll see that there's nothing 'complementary' about red and green - not to mention the fact that we see a mixture of yellow and blue as green, but also pure green light as green, so even 'green' as such is ill-defined, although in terms of lasers, we of course talk about single wavelengths by definition.
To the extent that there's a true complement to green, it would be magenta, but that's a different story altogether....
Sorry to digress.
Oh, I think you do not understand that as complementary colors, there is no red in the green plant material so, all the red light photons should be absorbed.