Hello today im going to show you how to make a powerful burning laser from DVD-RW, before we begin I must caution that its very powerful thing and can seriously damage your eyes, be careful.

Step 1: Diode

First thing first. We need to take off a laser diode from dvd driver, open it, find moving part with lenses, usually there is you’ll see 2 diodes IR for CD and just red for DVD, carefully take them from hit sinks, better before you start doing that solder together all the diode's terminals, in order to prevent damage from static electricity. Do not throw the rest, lenses may be helpful in this project, and small neodymium magnets good for levitron, if planning to do that. To be honest I don't have any DVD for about 3 years, so I just bought new diodes called LPC836 (Ali ) which is the most powerful one ever used in burners.

Step 2: Optic

Now lets talk about optic, as I said before, you can use native lenses from dvd, but you'll have to figure out how to fix them, I recommend to buy aixiz housing (Ali ), pair of dollars will solve all the problems with focusing. Interesting moment, you can buy only housing for about 3 dollars, or 5mw laser module with same housing but a dollar cheaper. So lets put our diode in to the housing, but first if you bought module like me, you need to remove the old insides and then press new diode.

Step 3: Driver

Next step is current limiter - driver, sadly we can not just connect diode to the battery its going to die immediately. So we need to build this simple circuit, if you google something about lasers from dvd before watching this video, you probably have seen easier one, I very don’t recommend to make it, when your diode is going to die is just a question of time. So as you can see there is only 2 components:

Chip LM317 (Ali or Amazon) and 3.3Ohm 2Watt resistor (Ali or Amazon). I also used little heat sink, but chip is absolutely cold, so you don’t need it. Solder resistor to the first two LM317’s terminals. And two wires, to first and last terminals, first is going to plus of laser diode and 3 rd to plus of power supply, minus is strait from battery to laser. One important moment, because I used a new diode I was 100% sure that it will handle this current, if you’re not sure use the series connection of two 3.3ohm resistors it’s give you a safe current for almost all diodes from dvd. I used a heat-shrink sleeve to protection from short. That’s it!

Step 4: Final

If you have a bit more experience you can try to make this driver, which I used for laser from preview. when I decided on the housing, first I made this aluminum washer-heat sink. Then made a new buttum, because needed more space for 18650 battery, I planed to solder all PCBs to the body of flashlight, but didn’t found good flux, so just press it inside. Best what I can imagine with driver board is just glue it on the right place. And at the and, press aluminum washer with collimator.