Hi all. Unfortunately I found that the blue LD from that broken PS3 laser block is fried. It does work (barely) and I do get some coherent light emission but with obvious facet damage.
In order to get any light emission I have to drive it at a silly (>300mA) current so it gets very hot and stops lasing in short order, so I've pulsed it at 1Hz with a short duty cycle.
That said its still coherent across a room so its not completely useless. Does anyone want it?
Pulsed driving is a useful trick if you have a partially damaged LD, or even an intact one but want to avoid overheating. Prior art seems to be the "near UV from a blue GaN LED" trick from a few years back.
Was looking into using a similar trick to get slightly more power from my (still working so far) HD-DVD burner diode setup for faster and more consistent writing, as it seems that pulsed power is more effective at writing the PCB with a small spot size.