RachelWe’ve made a lot of progress on our first product, and while I’m new enough at releasing products to have no idea yet what a realistic timeline is, I know we’re getting continuously closer! I promise a future post in which I detail more about how we’ve gone about this and what things we did right/wrong from the get-go.
A few months ago, we bought a high-quality optical power meter which made it clear how many interesting deviations from our expectations we could obtain in laser samples. Honestly, we thought we’d found some great lasers for excellent prices and it turned out that they were all unusable for different reasons. The process of obtaining laser samples and verifying them has been slow and tedious, but this is incredibly important. Safety is our number one priority, and we want to build trust. We decided that we wanted to make our products safe, which means keeping the optical output power low. Our first power meter was average quality and reported a reasonably correct average power. It turns out that some of the 1mW lasers were spiking up to 45mW! We don’t want to sell anything that is even capable of that kind of output power.
As an aside, all this laser testing raises my concerns about laser pointers. I’ve had some nominally 3mW laser pointers that clearly varied in output power. I need to dig them up and measure them on this nice power meter and see… do they spike? What’s the actual optical output power? If I find bad news, I will be working to establish better regulations for consumer lasers. I’ve had people point laser pointers at my face numerous times, even at optics conferences where people are experts at aligning lasers – you’d think they could miss the audience there, at least, eh?