Thread: Power supply for Laser Vortex

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I had some time and was playing around with a couple of 3 volt laser modules to try and throw together a laser vortex and just could not find a regulated 3 volt power supply in my junk box. I seem to always have a ton of 5 volt regulated supplies since they are pretty common and dirt cheap so I got to figuring and came up with a simple solution. Since the laser module I have required 3 volts at 300 milliamps, I grabbed three plain old diodes and wired them in series with a 5 volt 1 amp supply. Each diode drops the voltage about .7 volts for a total drop of 2.1 volts. My meter tells me that the 5 volt supply is actually putting out 5.1 volts so now I have a 3 volt regulated supply to run the module and it works fine. I added two decoupling capacitors to the input and output to keep the noise down but they may not even be needed.

Thanks Homey! I have 8 of those 5mw green laser pointers laying in a drawer and I wanted to make some vortexes. There on my to-do queue.

8 Green Laser Pointers?? You have far too many. I can help you reduce that quantity.

Yep, too many many