[Drake Anthony] makes building a cutting laser from a PC look easy, and it seems like it actually is. Almost everything you need can be found in a dead desktop unit. The diode is pulled from a DVD ...

Laser diodes are a staple of many gadgets around us, including CD and DVD players and computer drives ... manufacturing methods — molecular-beam epitaxy or metal–organic chemical-vapour ...

The recording laser beam passes through a beam expander then ... Using this system enables Blu-ray rather than DVD layer densities and effectively increases the capacity of the disk to 5 Tbyte.

One DVD pickup is used to scan the laser in the X-axis, while the other head is modified to carry the sample and move it in the Y-axis. The pickup head coils and laser are driven by an Arduino ...