3 ms·
something that I can't find much info on is the safety of laser line generators, eg: https://hackaday.com/2016/04/04/smartphone-and-ir-line-laser-measure-distan
by Jack000 10y ago
something that I can't find much info on is the safety of laser line generators, eg: https://hackaday.com/2016/04/04/smartphone-and-ir-line-laser-measure-distance/ https://hackaday.com/2016/04/04/smartphone-and-ir-line-laser...
intuitively the beam spread should make it much safer, but I'm still a bit uncomfortable with the idea of a 100mW IR laser, which is what those guys used.
- extrapickles 10y agoIts all about how much energy hits the eye, and for infrared lasers you can't assume someone will blink, so you cant use short exposure times. From the paper, they are pulsing the laser, so the laser is hazardous out to ~1.5m. Pg 5 of their paper goes into detail on the calculations one needs for laser safety.
- joshvm 10y agoIt seems like they used 100mW IR explicitly so they could use the platform outdoors. In most cases, you're fine looking at the reflected (usually diffuse) light, but you shouldn't stare into the beam. If you're working indoors you should be fine with visible low-power lasers, e.g. 1mW red or green. There are numbers in the paper (linked in the article) and they explicitly calculate the power vs the safe threshold. They basically say you shouldn't go closer than 1.5m to the device in operation. They give some suggestions to improving that, but it doesn't look like any of them were actually implemented.