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Set Free Your Inner Jedi (Or Pyro)
sirgoran writes "We've all thought about being the hero fighting off evil-doers and saving the day ever since we first saw Star Wars. The folks at Wicked Lasers have now brought that a little closer to reality with their latest release: a 1-Watt blue diode laser that can set skin and other things on fire. From an article at Daily Tech, where they talk about the dangers of such a powerful laser: 'And here's the best (or worst) part — it can set people (or things) on fire. Apparently the laser is so high-powered that shining it on fleshy parts will cause them to burst into flames. Of course it's equally capable of blinding people.' The thing that caught my eye was the price: $200. I wonder if they'll be able to meet the demand, since (if it works as advertised) this will be on every geek's Christmas list."
Does the right to bear arms cover arms which are for more awesome than ever conceived of by the writers of the constitution?
My other sig is clever.
But only if it stays trained on one spot for enough time and is close to the laser as opposed to 50 feet where the energy per square centimeter is less. Of course, some jerk will try it on his arm.
I accidentally found out what a 25 watt CO2 laser will do to the palm of your hand when a coworker left one on with no warning signs up and it burnt a branding iron across my palm as my hand quickly went into the beam. When I heard the sizzling, instead of keeping my hand moving through the beam, I pulled back and in the tens of milliseconds stopped before pulling back it vaporized (not burned) a hole about 1/8" deep in my hand.
Don't screw with this stuff you are not trained and careful or you'll wind up paying doctors and lawyers.
What he's thinking of is a variant of Selective laser sintering. If you can turn the laser on and off rapidly (or redirect the beam somewhere harmless rapidly), you can selectively melt/fuse materials to 3-d print some really fascinating things.
I'm not aware of any open source (a-la RepRap or the like) SLS systems, but I'd be happy to have the slashdot crowd prove me wrong on that point.
Frankly, I think slashdot should have avoided this posting. If one less person gets blinded, because a /.er buys one, and blinds his sibling or himself, it would have been worth it. Eyesight is too precious to lose and these things are just waaay too easy to screw up with.
I had a sucky sig.
I once 'knew a guy' when I was younger who did this exact thing. Heres how it went down.
Said 'guy' had a newtonian telescope on a very professional mount. Now usually, the purpose of the telescope is to take in light at the large opening and focus it into a small diameter at the eyepiece. However, the reverse also seems to work.
By sighting up the telescope first to the light sensor at the top of the assembly, one would then take out the eyepiece and replace it with a light source, preferably halogen. You could easily leave this on all night, to keep the light off, and turn it off in the day. At 1/4 mile, the beam is about 10ft across, and will still work to turn off the sensor, depending on the wattage of the source light.
But, thats just what I heard, as interfering with municipal/business fixtures you do not own is usually frowned upon by the police. It also becomes rather obvious who is doing it when there is a bright light coming from the line of sight from your house.
Class IV is serious. Not only can a direct hit or specular reflection blind you, but you can get eye damage from a diffuse reflection. That means that if you point it at a sheet of paper and stare at the paper, the spot can do damage. This happens faster than you can blink.
I used to work with class IV lasers in my lab - required goggles, interlocks, and vast amounts of paper work. Set my shirt on fire once with a similarly powered laser.
I think its OK for these to be available to the public but they should require some form of licensing and training of the sort used for firearms. Because of its range and lack of traceability, I think this is every bit as dangerous as a gun.
I don't even want to suggest in an open forum the sort of things you could do with this to cause serious injury and death - but if you have some imagination you can figure out what I might be thinking of.