This is the newest version of my ILDA board for use in multimedia laser systems.

1. Technical Specifications

This is an enhancement of the smaller A6211 laser diode driver. This board protects the laser diode from over-temperature and it can accept a PWM modulation to control the current through the diode.

LASER DRIVER OEM-D1-V4

TEC DRIVER OEM-D2-V4

Recently, I have made a new driver for portable (or stationary) laser diode modules. It is based on the LED2001 chip made by ST and it delivers up to 4A of current. You may run it either from a battery pack or from an adapter with a maximum voltage of 18V.

This is one of my designs for an extendable general-purpose microcontroller.

Recently, a friend of mine talked to me about his new hobby - handheld lasers. A big downside of the cheap lasers purchased from China turns out to be the design of their laser diode driver boards. Most of them are based on the LM358 operational amplifier and use a bipolar transistor to regulate the current. There is one major problem with this configuration - the transistor dissipates a lot of heat - especially if the voltage of the batteries is significantly larger than the forward voltage of the laser diode.

For a few months now, we have been testing our design of a flexible breakout board for the Max V line of Altera CPLD chips. It performed very well in our prototype application for lighting control and up to now we are very happy with it. The DeltaBrd is designed for Max V chips in a 100-TQFP package: 5M80Z,  5M160Z,  5M240Z, 5M570Z. The images below show both sides of the board.

The AlphaBrd operates from a single 8V - 12V DC power supply. It provides 3.3V and 5V to other devices by means of two AMS1117 LDO linear regulators. For voltage level translation, it uses one 74(A)HCT245 and one 74LVC245 integrated circuit. An led indicates if the board is powered. There is also a protection diode in case you accidentally reverse the input voltage.

In the course of the last few months, I built and worked with this flexible breakout board in order to test the ATtiny84A, ATtiny44A and ATtiny24A capabilities in a mesh network. It performed very well and satisfied the needs completely. Now, I would like to offer you the chance to use the BetaBrd in your own projects.