What started as a simple desire for a brighter laser pointer got carried away and I ended up building the brightest laser pointer in the world.

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I bought some green laser pointers on eBay recently and I have to say I was pretty disappointed with the lasers. Half of the laser pointers didn’t even turn on, and the ones that did work were very dim and covered in dents. I decided I should try opening them up and try to make them stronger.

I started with the classic “pot mod” by cranking up the potentiometer on the driver. It made the laser brighter but it still couldn’t burn stuff. I scrapped the driver and hooked it directly to my variable PSU but that killed the laser almost immediately. I realized that I needed cutting edge laser technology in order to satisfy my extreme desires.

I settled on using the Nichia NDG7475 laser diode as that is the brightest laser pointer out there that is still small enough to be jammed into a laser pointer housing. I hooked it up to a high efficiency buck converter for current regulation. I used a MOSFET as the main switching component as the stock switch in the laser pointer would not have handled the high current demands on the laser diode. I also used high drain 10440 li-ion batteries as the thought of 2 AAA batteries powering this new circuit is laughable.

The modded laser pointer is awesome. In fact it is probably the brightest laser pointer in the entire world if your definition of a laser pointer is a laser that fits in a 2x AAA host. I test out its burning capabilities by pointing the laser at a bunch of stuff.

Sometimes I don’t even know why I build crazy stuff like this.

Song towards end of vid: town of 24 bars - Unicorn Heads