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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

#221

Post by tpmoney »

neilv wrote: post #67
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…

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…

> Did they only give verbal reports and verbal depositions/testimony? Never wrote up a report for internal use or for professional publication?

I read that line as being in the context of the authors blog. As in “I’ve referenced this here before, and told the story to people in person, but never written out the story here on my blog.” Not literally saying that this is the first time in history any part of this story was committed to some form of the written word.

Re: How I got my laser eye injury

#222

Post by jaggederest »

foobarian wrote: post #159
wildzzz wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Patch fiber is usually using Class 1 or Class 1M lasers which are entirely safe to look at. Also the light spreads out very rapidly at the end of an unterminated fiber because there's no lens to focus it. So don't hold it directly up against your eye but like a foot away is fine. The lasers are less focused (i.e. cheaper) and the multi-mode fiber is wide so it spreads out very quickly. You can't actually see the IR l…

Just in case, always use the same eye to look into these things.

"Do not look into laser with remaining eye"

Re: How I got my laser eye injury

#223

Post by Szpadel »

londons_explore wrote: post #120

Are there any stats on the scale of laser eye injuries? Like what percentage of the world population are blind because of laser injuries? What percentage have permanent vision issues? How do those compare with the number of people who work with lasers? How does it compare with say vision loss from arc welding?

it's hard to know if you have eye damage, we have big blind spots right in the center of our eyes that we are not aware of.

our brain can fill out missing data from context and the same happens with eye damage.

with progressing damage you will see normally until you cross some threshold where your brain gives up and you are then blind

Re: How I got my laser eye injury

#224

Post by oh_my_goodness »

tlb wrote: post #100
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…

Why don't welding/cutting lasers add more divergence with built-in optics? Would it hurt performance? It seems like you could add 1 mrad and it would hardly make a difference at the usual working distance, but spread out to a meter over 1 km, so you can't zap people across town.

If it's a 1-micron wavelength laser with a 60 micron radius spot, the divergence can't be much less than about 5.7 mrad half angle. What makes eye safety tricky is just that 2.5 million milliwatts is a lot of power. Even when you spread it out some.

Re: How I got my laser eye injury

#226

Post by phaedrus »

My electronics mentor worked at 3M in the 80s. One of his coworkers thought it would be funny to prank him by asking him to look into a piece of equipment with something like a binocular microscope that the prankster had rigged to flash laser light at the sample. (I'm not sure what the equipment was, maybe something to do with chip lithography or looking at the surface of a magnetic platter.)

Somehow 3M was able to get out of compensating him for this workplace injury even though, if an ophthalmologist were to give him an eye exam (he tells me) they can literally read lithography writing (albeit backwards) burned in scar tissue on his retina. IIRC the prankster was never appropriately disciplined either.

Like OP it mostly affects/affected his peripheral vision and he just ignored it much of the time, but as he's gotten older his eyesight in general has gotten worse such that he can no longer compensate for it.

Re: How I got my laser eye injury

#227

Post by RIMR »

I have had lasers in my life a long time and have always appreciated the risks, but I have taken a couple of very brief hits to the eye.

Fortunately, my eye doctor has never seen anything that looks like damage, and aside from extreme nearsightedness totally unrelated to lasers, my eyes work fine.

These ultra-powerful lasers that will toast your retinas instantly scare the shit out of me. The fact that you can buy a tattoo removal gun on AliExpress (https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256806988159318.html) is just insane. The kinds of mass-violence you could commit with a device like are outrageous, I figure it's only a matter of time before someone uses something like this against an unsuspecting crowd.

Even just using the wrong kinds of lasers or UV lights at a concert can have awful consequences: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2008/jul/16/news.seanmicha... / https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/11/bored-ape-creator-say...

If this kind of thing can happen by accident, imagine what could be done on purpose.

Re: How I got my laser eye injury

#228

Post by bongodongobob »

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…

They are actual lasers and they're fine. Assuming you're talking about the light shows and not just random people.

Re: How I got my laser eye injury

#230

Post by BonoboIO »

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…

10km … damn. And the biggest problem is, the danger is invisible.
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