A high powered laser + a DIY reverse telescope makes a device that burns things much further away than any of my other laser creations!
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In the video I start by going over the reasons of why my previous laser blasters couldn't burn things from far away. In order to do long distance burning, I needed something with higher beam quality/smaller emitter size. I settled on a 1W 405nm laser diode. It is significantly less powerful than my 200W laser bazooka, but the high quality beam it makes can travel much straighter than those huge diode arrays.
A single spatial mode laser diode wasn't enough though. I built a beam expander (just a Galilean telescope in reverse) to widen the beam leaving the aperture so it could stay tighter over a distance. It was cool getting to use old technology on a device like this.
For the burning demos I started with some balloons. I found that the laser had to be very stable in order to pop balloons from a distance. I explain in the video that unlike a real ghunn, the laser needs time for the target to accumulate energy so it heats up significantly. With a tripod I was able to pull off some long distance balloon pops, but it became very difficult past 100ft. The most distant shot I made was from about 150ft.
For the boomy targets, I used a mix of several chemicals that don't don't like to be together, added charcoal to make it dark for laser absorption, and bound it into a puck with red gum.
Big thank you to Esco Optics for supplying the lenses used on the telescopes! escooptics.com