Lase-Pistol-1A

The Serious:

I know it seems like everyone and their dog makes some kind of "Phaser" laser gun at some point. But I was inspired to put mine up on the web after seeing someone had put two laser diodes in a Trek '09 swivel Phaser. I noticed however that his used a separate trigger for each beam emitter which seemed inelegant to me. I had been playing around with this problem for a while so when I finally realized the simplicity of the solution I felt a bit silly.

This project started in high school about 6 years ago, and I finally decided it was worth finishing sometime in late summer of this year. The first version -from before I had some exposure to basic electronics- was simply a 5mW Laser diode soldered onto the old barrel LED from the toy with no further modifications. After a year of college Mechatronics I decided to put my new skills to use.

Fellow trekkies will recognize the case for the "Lase-Pistol" up there as an Enterprise "Phase Pistol" toy from Art Asylum. I had a 200mW laser pointer from Deal Extreme that I used for the emitter. I wanted a way to use my high-ish powered laser for pointing (when I wasnt burning things) without the possibility of blinding someone from diffuse or reflected viewing, so I tried different ways of limiting current to the laser diode. The laser had it's own driver which I kept and supply power to using two TIP 1A NPN Transistors, one for each setting that I select using the original "stun/kill" switch. The "Blind" setting is simply the unadjusted 9 Volt battery, while the "Stun" setting uses a current divider. When not "OFF" the LED of whatever setting is active will stay lit even when the trigger is pressed. I know this doesn't sound like a big deal but before I tried this rather simple Transistor set up the LED lights would either only come on when you pressed the trigger (useless) or both would come on once the trigger was pressed, or they would turn off once the trigger was pulled. The way it is now the whole thing is a complete mess and will probably damage either the driver or the diode at some point. For now, though, it works. True to Polaris fashion.

Also used in this build was the LED housings from the '09 Trek movie Tricorder, which is quite a cool toy as far as spare parts are concerned, and only 15 bucks! I had to dremel out a lot of useless plastic in the pistol and shoehorn in all my electrics. This is the first such project I've ever done.

I recently found out that particular Phase Pistol toy is now selling for $100-400 MIB on Ebay. Looks like there will only ever be one Lase Pistol in my weapons locker.

I would like it known -and I hope it's obvious- that the cavalier attitude taken towards lasers in this post is in jest. I appreciate the potential for danger when playing with these things and I do not suggest people go around shooting persons or things with this pistol. I know that despite my enthusiasm and interest, I know next to nothing about lasers. I'm sure there's lots of people out there who think I'm a mook for making this thing. I agree.

This was a fun diversion, but for now I think I'm done making anything that could cause vision loss.

I have included the simplistic schematic (below), and I welcome any suggestions for a better way to go about this.

Thanks for reading!