I recently hooked up a cheap laser module to a mircrocontroller (via a MOSFET), mounted on top of a couple servos.
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This worked fine until I invited my coworkers to access the controls for my laser turret. One wrote a script that moved the servos from 0° to 180° and back repeatedly as quickly as possible.
Now my laser is dead. It is very dim and gets hot when power is applied, and both my cat and I are very sad.
Unfortunately, I don't have much information about the laser module itself other than what you see on the linked page. The inside looks like this:
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So what killed the laser? My suspicion is reverse voltage from a servo motor. If that's likely the culprit, what can I do to guard against it?
A photo of the whole rig although I'm not too sure it's very useful given the rat's nest of wires.
![]()
This worked fine until I invited my coworkers to access the controls for my laser turret. One wrote a script that moved the servos from 0° to 180° and back repeatedly as quickly as possible.
Now my laser is dead. It is very dim and gets hot when power is applied, and both my cat and I are very sad.
Unfortunately, I don't have much information about the laser module itself other than what you see on the linked page. The inside looks like this:
So what killed the laser? My suspicion is reverse voltage from a servo motor. If that's likely the culprit, what can I do to guard against it?
A photo of the whole rig although I'm not too sure it's very useful given the rat's nest of wires.
