
A Practical Guide to Lasers for Experimenters and Hobbyists - Phithagoras
http://www.repairfaq.org/sam/laserfaq.htm#faqtoc
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iamleppert
Laser Sam! He's amazing and has been part of Internet history since the
beginning. Everything I love about the web in simple, no-frills HTML.

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clock_tower
Absolutely! It's so good to see real HTML used to organize substantial
information, instead of the high-glitz low-content stuff we see so often these
days...

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Jack000
something that I can't find much info on is the safety of laser line
generators, eg: [https://hackaday.com/2016/04/04/smartphone-and-ir-line-
laser...](https://hackaday.com/2016/04/04/smartphone-and-ir-line-laser-
measure-distance/)

intuitively the beam spread should make it much safer, but I'm still a bit
uncomfortable with the idea of a 100mW IR laser, which is what those guys
used.

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extrapickles
Its all about how much energy hits the eye, and for infrared lasers you can't
assume someone will blink, so you cant use short exposure times.

From the paper, they are pulsing the laser, so the laser is hazardous out to
~1.5m. Pg 5 of their paper goes into detail on the calculations one needs for
laser safety.

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sbierwagen
Sam's Laser FAQ! Ah, the hours I spent reading through this when I was
younger.

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weinzierl
Lasers and the "Holography Handbook: Making Holograms the easy way". It had
xkcd style drawings back in the 80s.

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GregBuchholz
Except we called them "Forrest M. Mims" style drawings back then.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=forrest+m+mims&source=lnms&t...](https://www.google.com/search?q=forrest+m+mims&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X)

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Aelinsaar
Wow, that's a lot of different resources, and nicely organized. Speaking as a
responsible hobbyist who loves to learn about these things, this is a gift,
thank you.

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6stringmerc
Ctrl+F _Real Genius_ : 0

Awww.

Kidding aside, I'm a huge fan of the text/link layout used. So effective.
Thanks for showing this.

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brianzelip
Everything except the edge-to-edge text. Put that in a container!

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JoeMattie
I love Laser Sam. I acquired some parts from the NOVA project a few years back
and sent an email to Sam with some questions I had about what I had purchased.
He got back to me within minutes, and was super helpful.

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djfdev
This is great! All I could think about was this clip from Parks and Recreation

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVq10zG0UdY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVq10zG0UdY)

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guyzero
Do not look at laser with remaining eye.

