zoomkat:
Chagrin:
I've driven a cheap laser pointer using a transistor without issue. No problem switching it at 38KHz for use with an IR receiver.Interesting. How sensitive are the IR receivers to the visible red spectrum of the cheap laser pointers?
That's a tough question to answer; given the nature of the coherent beams of lasers it should be sensitive at "any" distance. I quickly got a signal at ~12 meters distance (the longest clear span in my house) without tweaking the laser focus, frequency, or power and didn't take it any farther. My goal was only to build a laser tripwire and I wasn't attempting long distance communication.