Recent content by DaveE

This is one of my first real designs for money as an EE. It was drawn by hand (early 1980's) and is a #$@! sight clearer than your attempt. The reason you don't draw readable schematics is probably that you don't care enough about communication with other engineers to put in the effort required...

Maybe you should type "\text{,i.e.}" ?

Vertical and horizontal in this case.

\text{,i.e.,} is one way, which looks like this: ##\text{,i.e.,}## or did you want ##\text{-i.e.,}##? Your post was a bit confusing about that.

You could just buy a laser level. They've already figured it out for you. OTOH, they won't be as bright as you want because they don't want to spend extra money and/or hurt people. Here's my 5 minute experiment.

I think this circuit will work the same if you replace all of the transistors with a piece of wire (OK, maybe a forward biased diode). Why would your transistors ever turn off or decrease their collector current? How would that happen?

Normally I reserve this post for people that don't provide a schematic, but in this case I'll make an exception.

You could also consider scanning a 1D beam in a plane faster than your shutter speed or the rain drops. This may be easier. Something like a reflection off of polished faces of a hexagonal nut (the mirrors) mounted on a motor shaft. You may have to fiddle with aliasing issues depending on the...

It would be quite unusual for a laser to be converging away from the exit. Normally the beam waist will be near the aperture, and in expensive lasers at a specified location. It will have a predetermined diameter. Although all of this gets messy with cheap or diode lasers. in any event it's the...

Sorry, I don't have great study advice. But, these basic math subjects (Trig, Calculus) aren't just hurdles to overcome to get an EE degree. They are EE, at least in most subdisciplines. You will be using them very frequently IRL, when you need the answer and there's no instructor to correct...

Yes, most likely. Maybe two if you want 1D collimation.

Thank you!!! How about something like a Platinum badge that's subscription based to remind people (like me) to send more money. It seems that once you get the Gold thing it's good forever and we're never reminded to provide more support. IDK, maybe ad revenue dominates user contributions in...

If you're an EE then it's definitely the 2nd version. The canonical quadratic form would be ##{(\frac{s}{\omega_o})}^2 +\frac{1}{Q} (\frac{s}{\omega_o}) +1##. This would be in the Laplace transform of the second order DE for example. https://authors.library.caltech.edu/records/cf0mt-rwk16

But then what regulates the resistor current? If the voltage applied changes, so does the current. Just semantics, I guess. It works more like a resistor, as you described. More like a current limiter.

Very fast rise time switches with (sort of) high power. Most have a β emitter to "pre-ionize" the gas. It's a spark gap, but not a "normal" one, they are biased right up to the edge of conduction. We used them in a laser Q-Switch many years ago for a DoD contractor. Now days that's not a great...