Thanks.

I stripped down a few more dvd drives. Hint: NEC and Panasonic ones are good, Hitachi-LG ones not so much, they have weird diodes in, with way too many pins. Some sort of integrated laser/pattern reader I think.

All the diodes measured at least 250mW @ 3.3V, one of them was over 300mW! I have over a watt worth of laser diodes on the bench at the moment, and I still have 5 drives to ruin Now to figure out the best, or al least prettiest, way to combine all the beams. I'm thinking some sort of sub-miniature death star sort of arrangement, which would look pretty cool in a darkened room with some smoke in...

pca