181–190 of 200 posts
Looking forward to this used in car headlights, dazzle's gonna be awesome.
How about for people who are tailing hard -- just pop them in the rear view :S
Obviously impossible to defend against weapons like Russia's tsunami-triggering underwater nukes. But seems to rule out anything air-based?
The article rightly points out the industrial impact of more powerful and compact lasers but I cannot wait for those PCSELs to reach the small workshop market. Having a cheap laser able to cut metal at home / small shops would be so useful (And sneakily dangerous as lasers are).
The laser only melts the metal, it doesn't move it out of the cut, and some metals can react in plain air to sputter back at the emitter optics. Gas is forced under pressure at the cut to clear it. With some metals and/or thinner (speaking from a commercial perspective) stock, you can get away with plain air at high volumes of normal air compressor pressures with good results if it's very clean and dry. Others require specifically reactive or nonreactive gases or blends of gases. That's true for most hot cutting processes though. Plasma usually consumes plain air to blow out the cut, oxy-fuel uses excess oxygen to reactively blow out the cut. Lasers with their extremely narrow kerf are more finicky, which can mean a surprisingly high consumables cost.
More powerful lasers also require the optical hardware to operate in a light vacuum. Plasma generated by dust and air itself will ablate expensive parts. Home shops shouldn't need that much power though. If you're cutting thick or difficult metals regularly, that's not a hobby any more.
Then there's the byproducts. Organics get blasted into all kinds of random organic-ish things that aren't great to ingest or emit at ground level near neighbors (PSA, this is true for current hobby lasers). Cutting metals can get really exciting if you don't clean often and thoroughly enough to prevent a critical mass of finely powdered byproducts. An iron or aluminum fire will wreck your laser. An iron and aluminum fire will wreck your laser, and whatever it's sitting on, and the concrete below that.
Things like this make me think Moore's law still has a lot of runaway beyond transistor density and raw computing power.
Why would a welding laser have anything to do with moore's law?
The article explains that it has potential for welding and other commercial applications but it's not quite there yet. It did cut through 100um steel. It's a good read.
It looks to me like we are on the cusp of the laser handguns era
Laser handguns are probably never going to be a thing. How many places are there on a human body where a cauterized hole a few mm across will kill or incapacitate someone? How likely is someone going to be to hit those places accurately with a pistol? There are some interesting niche uses for laser sniper carbines[1], IMO, like punching holes in a gas tank and igniting the vapour, burning out security camera sensors,…
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> There are already so many ways to defeat locks, that locks are just there to keep honest people honest and to slow down criminals. If you live at a lower end apartment complex, you might be shocked at how many doors your key will unlock, if you apply a light turning pressure and thrust the key in and out a few times. I know I was. But it came in handy when one of my xmas gifts had been delivered to the front office…
sounds like you basically just used your key as a bump key
I've tried this on higher-end tumblers and I could really feel that it wasn't going to work. It's just about the el-cheapo builder-grade locks (which comprise a shocking percentage of home and apartment locks).
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Why would a welding laser have anything to do with moore's law?
Shrinking things on silicon wafers.. The article explains that it has potential for welding and other commercial applications but it's not quite there yet. It did cut through 100um steel. It's a good read.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Shrinking things on silicon wafers.. The article explains that it has potential for welding and other commercial applications but it's not quite there yet. It did cut through 100um steel. It's a good read.
What does that have to do with "shrinking thing on silicon wafers" ? This isn't really even new technology. Welding and cutting lasers have been around for a while. Do you think that cutting steel and making CPUs is the same process or that making smaller transistors just needs more power in the laser?