Great news, glad to hear it. I'd never really looked into the various ratings of LASERs and the implications related to using them. I always assumed the cheapo red LASER pointers were fairly safe but never took it further. I was taught to not look into the beam and left it at that.haklesup wrote:I think you are in a very safe territory. Calss 2 lasers are considered generally safe requiring 10 to 15 minutes of direct unwavering eye exposure to cause limited damage. In my third link, it describes an experiment by a doctor who claims that red laser is considered very safe.
Furthermore, say that laser is 1mW (.001 J/s) and you are on for 200us at a time or 20ms per second cumulative. The exposure would end up being 0.2uW (0.2 J/s) a 10 second exposure would result in about 2 Joules of heat delivered to the eye which is about 0.5 calories which will raise 1g of water by 0.5C. I estimate an eye is 4-8grams (a wild guess) so you could only impart a tiny fraction of a degree of heating to an eye. Okay, so your not heating the whole eye but you get my drift.
With a class 2 laser, you should be on safe legal footing with 100% duty cycle.
In the interest of I've got nothing to lose the drives are broken anyway I gutted two CDROM drives and extracted the LASER diodes to experiment with. I'm on even safer ground I believe as these LASERs were marked CLASS I and I'll still be pulsing them for ambient light rejection.
An exciting and fun project to deal with quite the opposite, thanks for the help and info guys.
