Info Manual

Universal led DVD laser driver

DVD laser pick up hack can be found all over the internet, others use the linear type laser driver that uses LM317 as the regulator for the laser. Actually laser is also a type of diode that emits light and with the use of a focus lens, we can attain just a dot for it to be called a pointing light device.

 Shown on the left was the constant current driver on my previous post about led driver. This Buck converter can supply up to 700 mah constant current to a high power led of 3 watts. The heart of the circuit was NCP3063 made by On semiconductor.
I made two of them one will drive the high power led and the other will drive the DVD laser for this hack.

Since theres no documentation of the maximal current a DVD laser must have, I made one with a 1.5 ohms sense resistor, and the other with 1.8 ohms, both differ with current that will provide to the led.

The forward voltage of the led will just float when the CC driver is connected to the load.




R203 and R202 will determine the current output of this driver. It is very important to calculate it for your led, if you know the specification of your high power led.

NOTE: never power up the CC driver without load. the NCP3063 will be damaged.

The test show a 3 watts cool white led connected and the CC driver is powered by a 12 volts AC adaptor.

The actual current being supplied to the led is actually 370mah..(forgot to take picture with a ammeter connected in series with the load..next time :)....)

With the same LED CC driver, a blue high power led is connected as shown below.




The led being tested here actually have different forward voltage drop and according to their datasheet.

and now to test if this led CC driver will power up the DVD laser,

cool yes it can be powered by this driver. I am thinking of the LM317 before but i wanted it to have a wide input voltage range.

shown below is the test, inside the black tube was the dvd laser