Laser

This circuit was originally designed to detect laser light pulses for an optical Ethernet communications system. It has good ambient light immu..

Inexpensive, 16-bit, monolithic DACs can serve almost all applications. However, some applications require unconventional approaches. This Design Idea design concerns circuitry I recently designed for a tunable-diode laser spectrometer for a Mars-exploration application. The control circuitry included two 16-bit DACs that interface to the radiation-hardened, 8051-variant 69RH051A microcontroller...

If you have ever worked with lasers, you know how fun and interesting it can be, you also know how expensive it can be. The high voltage power supplies for the laser tubes are often more expensive then the tubes themselves. This supply can be built with commmon parts, most of which you probably already have in your junk box. The secret is the transformer used. It is a common 9V 1A unit, connected backwards for step up...

When the light head has found the brightest spot, it lights up the high efficiency led at the front. The motor is a 10mA @ 2.5V FTB gear motor, partnr 242551 from conrad The 2466 solar panels are carried by a giant 6A diode just for looks. The circuit is quite well tested by now, you might have trouble finding the 74AC86. (digikey)..

This circuit uses a large 1cm X 1cm silicon PIN photo diode and a transimpedance amplifier to measure the light power output of infrared and visible LEDs and laser diodes. It can be modified to produce almost any milliwatts to volts scale factor. It can be connected to either a multi-meter or an oscilloscope...

This circuit was originally designed to detect laser light pulses for an optical Ethernet communications system. It has good ambient light immunity...

To get the maximum performance from an optical instrument that uses a laser source and a CCD linear-array sensor (Figure 1a), an A/D converter should perform over the maximum possible range. You can maximize this range by stretching the upper reference of the flash A/D converter to coincide with the highest lit pixel in the CCD array. Most flash A/D converters allow you to control the extremities of the reference-resistor array. To compensate for optical-path variations, you can use the signal from the peak detector to control the light-source intensity...