Harvesting a Laser Diode From an Optical Drive

Have you ever wondered how powerful that tiny little laser is in your CD, DVD, or BluRay drive/burner? Well now you can. Let's take one apart and get it going as a stand alone laser. It can be used for future projects not limited to light shows, laser engraving, games and experiments. The sky is the limit!

Before you proceed, please ensure that you are using laser rated safety glasses. The power of these laser are unknown and are dependent on the manufacturer of these devices. Some lasers are also infrared and are invisible to the naked eye yet can still do significant vision damage. Proceed with caution at your own risk.

Supplies that you will need for this project:
- Laser rated safety glasses
- 5V Power adapter
- Broken or old optical drive
- LM317 1.5A Regulator and heat sink
- 1N4001 Diode
- 10 ohm and 1k ohm Resistors
- 100 ohm Potentiometer
- Switch
- Wires
- Perforated board
- Solder
- Soldering iron
- Multimeter

Using the following schematic, trace out your board and solder on all the components. It should look like the photo when completed. You can test out the circuit by using a multimeter or try it on a regular LED.

Carefully take apart your optical drive, looking for the area beneath the optical lens sitting on a carriage. Remove the carriage and look for a component with a ribbon cable on one end, a hole on the other and a canister in the middle. Unsolder the ribbon cable and solder on some thin wires as leads. Once this is complete, you can test the leads of the laser using the multimeter. The middle lead on mine is ground while the other two (infrared and red laser) are positive.

When you are ready, you can hook up your laser to your power regulated supply. These lasers have had their lenses removed and will show a wide beam. You can keep the lenses and mirrors if you wanted a focused beam. Here is an example from a DVD and a BluRay drive.

And that's pretty much it for this project. You can use this Instructable as a foundation to power all types of lasers (red, blue, infrared) for your future projects. It would be pretty neat to further this project to make a handheld laser engraver, but we'll keep that for next time. Cheers!