The Purpose Of This Page?

Arctos make the one of the best laser projectors in the world and their designs are just amazing. The time, effort and workmanship is fantastic and i wish i could afford one. Arctos make the most powerful diode projectors with the best beam quality in the world. Arctos have patented their design for combining diodes so it should not be copied to make money.

Arctos website

Who Are Arctos?

They are a Germany company headed up by Thomas who designed and patented a way of combining lots of laser beams into one usable beam

What Does The Inside Of An Arctos Projector Look Like?

We have all seen the amazing photos -

Understand The Above Photo

There are 48 150mw 642nm red diodes in banks of 6, knife edged together, then stacked 4 high. Once combined there are two sets of combined beams which go into telescopics to make one small beam. The two beams are then combined through a cube to make a single small usable beam.

The same applies to the blue, there are 12 445nm diodes knife edged, stacked, put through telescopics then joined though a cube to make one small usable beam.

The green is just two modules combined through a cube.

How Does It All Actually Work?

Now theres a question!

First you need to pick the diode you are going to use, i used a 660nm open can diode running at 250mw. Then you have to pick a suitable lens, i went with the Roithner 7020h lens. This lens will give a beam of 3mm wide by 5mm high at aperture.

Each diode needs to be insulated from the aluminium block and other diodes, i used a thermal heat compound. Due to the method i was using i could only do 2 diodes at a time and the heat sink compound takes a full 24 hours to dry.

The objective is to knife edge the beams into as squarer shape as possible. So i used 24 diodes in total, thats two sets of 12. My input beam into the telescopics is 12mm wide by 15mm high.

You have to stack the beams, each beam measure 3mm wide and 5mm high at aperture. So each set of 4 is stepped at 5mm hight differences, the back being the highest and the front being the lowest.

Once all the beams have been knife edged and stacked you end up with something like this

Now to stack the 12 beams and add telescopics. Im using telescopics from Edmund Optics

3x telescope NT47-348 and a NT47-911 - This will give about a 5mm beam @ 1.2mR

2x telescope NT47-346 with a NT47-911 - This will give about a 5.5-6mm beam @1mR

.......NT47-348 .......NT47-911

Beam --> |)................)| ---->

Arctos have many years of experience and lots of money to use better optics, so they are able to combine more diodes into a smaller beam.

With a bit more fine tuning i should be able to get the beam to 4mm as each beam measures 1mm wide

This is only one set of beam - 1.5mm high

Now add another 12 beams -

Then add a cube

To add a cube you have to change the polarization of one set of beams as shown below. Arctos use a a waveplate to change the polarization of the beams but these are very expensive. I used two mirrors as shown above they are positioned like x and y galvo mirrors to change the polarization.

The final output beam is 5mm wide by 5mm high @ 1.2mR and im getting a power reading over just over 5watts...

To stabilise the diodes and mirror mounts i have tec'ed the entire base, you can see the gap here between the diode base plate and the main base plate. If you do not do something about the heat generated by the diodes then the beams will come out of alignment as the mirror mounts warm up. Also keeping the diodes at a cool stable temp will make them last longer.

So How Come Ive Copied Arctos's Design?

Well you only infringe on a patent if you use it to make money by selling the product or using it for commercial gain. This multi diode red is none scanning and i have no plans to sell it, its also not in a case so theres not much i can do with it. Ive not spent all this time and money building this diode array to annoy Arctos, i built it to show my luv for Arctos and what they do.