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How I got my laser eye injury

funraniumlabs.com

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Re: How I got my laser eye injury

#161

Post by ethbr1 »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #155
krisoft wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They make hardware prototypes. When you do that having your own machine shop can lower the iteration time and thus speed up the development. Just from the top of my head: waymo develops their own lidars, akamai obviously needed a ton of machining for the kite, project loon probably had machined components. And those are just the flashy examples we heard about outside of the company. They can have ton of other project…

Duh! Of course! I think Google and I only think search/ads. I forgot Alphabet has all that other stuff going on.

So does Alphabet.

Re: How I got my laser eye injury

#162

Post by neilv »

kragen wrote: post #113
neilv wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I read through it, it does sound like an apocryphal old story, since too many of the details are too perfect setups for the teller. Then again, occasionally real life really does happen unbelieveably, including when fudge-ups are involved. Maybe what's most unbelieveable is that, to the extent the story tells, the only known injured person was the laser safety officer. Presumably the safety person was partly in th…

possibly his boss asked him to not write up the report

Yes, I don't want to speculate, but would hope that, for whatever happened, the affected people were notified, and all the appropriate safety officer processes were followed up on.

Or, the story might have started a bit like when grandkids ask grandpa how he got that arm injury, and instead of telling the troubling story about shrapnel in the war, or the car crash, he tongue in cheek tells a fantastic tall tale of fishing, when along comes a bear who wanted to eat his fish, chock full of lessons.

That could've been a goal with students: if one ran out of real-world case studies to drive home laser safety practices, a semi-plausible, if over-the-top, narrative of how a not-unlikely cavalier mistake could become a clusterfudge, with the story of course hitting all the safety practices they were just told about.

There would normally be verbal cues as to the kind of story, and there'd be the context of telling, both of which are lost in blog posts.

Re: How I got my laser eye injury

#163

Post by NotYourLawyer »

dmd wrote: post #28

I'm not entirely sure, but I suspect my Hole In My Eye[0] came from being 30 years old (I'm 46 now) and saying "look, this laser pointer is so low power, I can shine it in my eye to no ill effect!". [0] https://dmd.3e.org/a-hole-in-my-eye/

“Low power” lasers are sometimes wildly more powerful than they claim to be. I guess what do you expect when you buy a Chinese laser pointer on Amazon for 5 bucks.

Re: How I got my laser eye injury

#164

Post by cowthulhu »

notelectronic wrote: post #119
DannyBee wrote: post #17

So I laser weld, and beyond my own PPE, interlocks (gun won't fire if it's not touching metal, etc), the most important part of the whole setup is laser safety curtains. Because it's a 2500 watt laser, if i didn't have laser safety curtains , the relections/etc could very easily blind someone at a fairly long distance. The NOHD (nominal ocular hazard distance) is something like 10km (2500 watt laser, 0.06mm spot size…

I get laser safety curtains, but what do you do for reflections off the ceiling? Asking because our makerspace was recently donated a fiber laser welding unit and we don’t yet know best practices for not blinding our membership short of building a completely enclosed separate room for it with door interlocks.

Are lasers typically able to reflect off of surfaces that diffuse light (ie drywall)? I’m totally ignorant when it comes to laser safety, apologies if this is a stupid question .

Re: How I got my laser eye injury

#165

Post by gadders »

mpalmer wrote: post #12
zoky wrote: post #3

I’m not saying it didn’t happen as described, but this really kinda reads like the “Bald eagle named Albert Einstein flew into the classroom” copypasta…

Never let facts get in the way of a good story. The build-up is great (VP's car, elementary school, military base) and the punchline is funny, but it's just a bit too perfect ("and what's above us?", cue clouds). Even the name Bob sounds like it's been chosen for comedy. It's clearly a mostly true story that's been refined and polished over the years.

Yeah, I thought it sounded a bit too good to be true as well...

Re: How I got my laser eye injury

#166

Post by krisoft »

franciscop wrote: post #111

I've touched all sorts of things in my "Maker" years, but one of the things I'm never going to touch by far is lasers. I know how bad they are, and I also know how woeful unqualified I'm for messing with lasers. Heck, I've even left a couple of dancefloors in clubs that I heavily suspected were firing actual lasers at the people, wonder how many of those were actual lasers vs light pointers and how many people got un…

> Heck, I've even left a couple of dancefloors in clubs that I heavily suspected were firing actual lasers at the people, wonder how many of those were actual lasers vs light pointers and how many people got unknowingly injured, but it was just not worth the risk.

It is not really clear what you are saying here. What do you mean by "actual lasers" vs "light pointers".

Whether or not a light show is safe has nothing to do with the light source being an "actual laser" or not. What matters is what kind of laser and how it is used.

Re: How I got my laser eye injury

#167

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

afterburner wrote: post #157
gumby wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was in the Marine Corps and every time we got to test some new piece of gear the safety officer was like "No, you can't live fire... I thought the whole point of the Marines was to cause maximal amounts of damage. Are you implying there is a constraint on that? But now I understand why the marines hate the navy: I had a buddy who'd been in the navy and he said they kept the kids busy by cleaning and painting ever…

> I thought the whole point of the Marines was to cause maximal amounts of damage. I thought their point was to expose themselves to maximal amounts of damage.

> I thought their point was to expose themselves to maximal amounts of damage.

I hate to be pedantic, but technically the whole point is to expose the enemy to maximal amounts of damage. Whoever that is. Anything else is incidental.

Re: How I got my laser eye injury

#168

Post by RandomThoughts3 »

dctoedt wrote: post #103
RandomThoughts3 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I may or may not be aware of hull damage being caused or not caused by a rifle being fired from the flight deck of a ship. My point being, your safety officer had a point.

> hull damage being caused or not caused by a rifle being fired from the flight deck of a ship How did that happen? Our MarDet would occasionally do live-fire training off the flight deck (CVN-65); they naturally pointed their weapons away from the ship .... Or are you talking about hitting the hull of a different ship, e.g., one of the tin cans in plane guard, or alongside during an UNREP? Seems like that would ...…

Hypothetically, someone could have left a guest (like say an engineer from the shipyard doing sea acceptance testing) fire a rifle and an unlucky wave reflection might have bounced a round back towards the bow.

Re: How I got my laser eye injury

#169

Post by throwup238 »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #110
DannyBee wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, to clarify - what i have is a very nice IPG lightweld 1500 XR. They are normally not cheap (30k), and are very nice and well thought out safety wise. One of the fun parts when i lived in the bay area was that as companies got acquired, they didn't know what to do with the stuff they had before acquisition that isn't needed anymore, and it either sits in a warehouse, or gets auctioned off (or both!) So for example…

> plenty of VMC's in the machine shop So now I have to know why Google has a machine shop. Beyond the obvious "why not?"

IIRC it was started in earnest for Nexus phone prototypes in the early 2010s.

Re: How I got my laser eye injury

#170

Post by neilv »

Miraste wrote: post #136
N_A_T_E wrote: post #109

I worked in a laser lab for a few months early in my career. After the safety training I fear lasers getting near my eyes in situations most people don't care about. I even look away from barcode scanners at grocery stores. Sometimes I wonder about lidar being shot in all directions from those self-driving cars around SF.

There's been at least one sketchy self driving startup that drove their LiDAR hard enough they burnt holes in journalists' camera sensors at CES. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/01/man-says-ces-lidars-las...

I'd wondered about the eye safety of LIDAR on prototype autonomous vehicles, but then thought "surely anything at all unsafe to eyes wouldn't be allowed on public streets."

Now I'm reminded of all the unregulated recklessness in some technical topics that I do understand, and realizing it's silly to assume.

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