LaserUser.com Forum (formerly RDWorksLab)

2 Apr 2019

Russ is still manufacturing and selling his power meter as seen on his videos-RDWorks Learning Lab 53 Power Meters and the doHICky comparator https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lO9rWlobLZU

Email Russ at sarbarmultimedia@rdworkslab.com

A great investment that really helps you understand your particular laser's power characteristics.

How to order the DoHicky seems to come up fairly often- this is the text of the last email from him regarding the best way to reach him to order one:

Hi Gene
Yes, You Tube canned their message service a few months ago. Add a comment with an email address. Comments always get auto copied to my gmail. I immediately remove the comment so no one's email sits in public view.
I have enough work to do responding to my own emails and comments so I rarely visit the forum. I think Pete set up some sort of auto forwarding system to my email address to handle specific questions aimed at me. May be worth checking with him . Maybe members have to enter a specific forwarding page to leave their questions and email address. I always answer everything no matter how trivial.

I would find his latest video and enter a comment there.

I got one! I left a comment on the dohicky video. Within a couple hours we'd taken care of the money side of things, Russ sent me the files, and the dohicky was in the mail. It took about 9 days to get from UK to OKC.

I got one too. It already came in useful to diagnose a power problem (thought tube was prematurely failing, but turned out to be alignment issue.)

I made a spreadsheet to make it easier to enter and store multiple readings over time: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing You should be able to copy it to your GDrive to create your own records.

There's multiple sheets along the bottom with instructions, a sample, and copies of older reports.

I got one too, and I hadn't even gotten my laser yet! It was the only way I could find to measure the power for a price that was reasonable. One of the first things I plan to do when the laser gets setup is to record some power measurements so I'll know if there is problems in the future.
Mark Pipi; I see you have what looks like a fairly precise "Hours on Tube". Did you add a power on meter to your laser and if so, how did you set it up? BTW: your spreadsheet looks like it will be very useful!!!

Robert, as soon as you get your laser AND have it hooked up to your PC, go File > Vendor Settings > RD8888 for password > Clear Info Tab > EXECUTE to clear the information. From that point, you go Config > System Settings > System Info > READ to see the time data. It is classic RDWorks design to have to go through two different menu paths to accomplish things but... that... is... RDWorks.

And Lightburn now shows this under EDIT->GET CONTROLLER INFO

We have a dohicky at our hackspace, i have bought a dual probe digital temp meter to use with it, thinking i'll use one of the K type thermocouples in the dohicky, and the other one left in the ambient air,

then i can just press the 'T1 - T2' button and it will display the difference between the 2 thermocouple temps.

I know i should watch the video again, but can someone remind be how long to run the laser for to get the correct reading,
this will be fun as out LAOS controller has the speed set a 0 - 100% not millimeters per second, so i'm going to have to play about manually timing different lengths of line drawn to get the right one.

aslo, was there a comparator chart to use to get the final watt output from the temp rise? or is it.. 40 degrees C rise from ambient = 40 watts of power?

Found out the production Dohicky's are made with enough mass to show degrees C temp as watts,

Amazingly this means my hackspaces laser cutters cheap 60 watt tube is outputting 61.8 watts (did it 4 times and got within 0.6 of a watt / C each time)
This is with it pulling 22mA.