Resident Evil (film) Laser Trap Room

[WilliamBell]

Hi! I want to recreate the laser trap room from resident evil in my theater auditorium hall for a screening of the movie using laser pens and fog. To make the grid like in the film, I need 20 lasers to look good in our hall. They are 5mw and 405 nm. I am looking for advice and guidance on properly powering them all ( each requiring 3 V ), having them all connected to a single switch to activate all of the lasers. Connecting them I can handle but its the power thing I'm not confident on so as to not fry all of the lasers and not have them be too weak. The lasers will be attached to a PVC frame.

 

[Treybert]

Laser diodes are far more delicate to over-amperage than led's are. If they're given the chance, they will pull far more than they can handle. The problem is with how that current is limited. In a lot of battery powered laser pointers, they're actually relying on the batteries themselves to limit the current. That means if you manually wire in a 3v power supply, you might fry them.

Next, laser pointers aren't usually designed for constant use. If you read the label, it might even have a warning such as 'do not use for longer than X seconds' or something.

Of course, you could simply feed 3V power in directly and see what happens.



Alternatively, you could keep the batteries in the laser pointers and wire each to their own relay.... then simply energize all 20 relays at the same time.