Tag: Mini-lathe

Anything would be better than just taping some gel filters to the front of the bare photodiode package:

Right?

I heaved the slab of ½ inch black acrylic left over from the Totally Featureless (WWVB) Clock into the laser cutter and, two passes at 90% power later, had a somewhat lumpy 32 mm donut with an 11 mm hole in the middle. Because acrylic is opaque to the IR light from a CO₂ laser (which is why it cuts so well) and black acrylic is opaque to visible light (which is what the photodiode is designed for), this is at least as good as an aluminum housing and much easier to make.

Chuck the donut into Tiny Lathe and bore out the hole:

When it’s a snug fit to ½ inch brass tube (about the same size as the photodiode’s active area), flip it around, and bore the other size out to fit the photodiode case.

Ram the tube in place, grab the large recess, and center the tube:

That’s the chuck-in-chuck trick I used with the coasters, because the neither of the larger four-jaw chucks close far enough to get their inside jaws inside those little holes.

[Edit: Got that backwards: I bored the big recess first.]

Skim most of the OD down, then, because I am a dolt forgot to put a spacer in there, flip it around again, get it running true (the chuck aligns the flat side):

Then skim the rest of the OD to clean it up.

Cut some filter gels to fit inside the recess:

Even though they’re pretty much transparent to thermal IR, a focused IR laser beam cuts them just fine. The little tab at 6 o’clock (remember round clocks with hands?) keeps the cut circle from falling out.

Drill & tap for an M3 setscrew to hold the photodiode in place:

Put them all together:

I must conjure a better mount for the thing, because this is way too precarious:

Early results suggest it works better than the previous hack job, without ambient light sneaking around the edges of the filter pack.

The red-dot pointer on the OMTech laser cutter has the same problem as my laser aligner for the Sherline mill: too much brightness creating too large a visual spot. In addition, there’s no way to make fine positioning adjustments, because the whole mechanical assembly is just a pivot.

The first pass involved sticking a polarizing filter on the existing mount while I considered the problem:

The red dot pointer module is 8 mm OD and the ring is 10 mm ID, but you will be unsurprised to know the laser arrived with the module jammed in the mount with a simple screw. Shortly thereafter, I turned the white Delrin bushing on the lathe to stabilize the pointer and installed a proper setscrew, but it’s obviously impossible to make delicate adjustments with that setup.

Making the polarizing filter involves cutting three circles:

Rotating the laser module in the bushing verified that I could reduce the red dot to a mere shadow of its former self, but it was no easier to align.

Replacing the Delrin bushing with a 3D printed adjuster gets closer to the goal:

Shoving a polarizing filter disk to the bottom of the recess, rotating the laser module for least brightness, then jamming the module in place produces a low-brightness laser spot.

The 8 mm recess for the laser module is tilted 2.5° with respect to the Y axis, so (in principle) rotating the adjuster + module (using the wide grip ring) will move the red dot in a circle:

The dot sits about 100 mm away at the main laser focal point, so the circle will be about 10 mm in diameter. In practice, the whole affair is so sloppy you get what you get, but at least it’s more easily adjusted.

The M4 bolt clamping the holder to the main laser tube now goes through a Delrin bushing. I drilled out the original 4 mm screw hole to 6 mm to provide room for the bushing:

The bushing has a wide flange to soak up the excess space in the clamp ring:

With all that in place, the dimmer dot is visually about 0.3 mm in diameter:

The crappy image quality comes from excessive digital zoom. The visible dot on the MDF surface is slightly larger than the blown-out white area in the image.

The CO₂ laser hole is offset from the red laser spot by about 0.3 mm in both X and Y. Eyeballometrically, the hole falls within the (dimmed) spot diameter, so this is as good as it gets. I have no idea how durable the alignment will be, but it feels sturdier than it started.

Because the red dot beam is 25° off vertical, every millimeter of vertical misalignment (due to non-flat surfaces, warping, whatever) shifts the red dot position half a millimeter in the XY plane. You can get a beam combiner to collimate the red dot with the main beam axis, but putting more optical elements in the beam path seems like a Bad Idea™ in general.

The OpenSCAD source code as a GitHub Gist: