Integrating a Microchip Laser: Drive, Timing, Thermal
The MINI-100 is 2.5 g and 14.5 mm long. Everything hard about it is mechanical and electrical, not optical.
Drive
100 µJ at 3.5 ns from 2 V, 12 A, with a drive pulse up to 1 ms. That's a short, hard pulse into a small diode. The rail has to hold voltage for the duration, and the connection to the module has to be short. On a 2.5 g part, the wire usually weighs more than the laser.
Get the driver close, keep the loop small, and scope the voltage at the module rather than at the supply.
Timing
The Q-switch fires a few nanoseconds after the pump builds. Trigger-to-light delay is fixed per unit within a tolerance; jitter isn't. If your receiver gates on the pulse, measure both, then treat the delay as a constant.
At 10 Hz you have plenty of time to timestamp on the host. At 5 kHz, in the ER10 family, you don't, and the framing matters more than the absolute number.
Thermal
2.5 g of glass and aluminium has almost no thermal mass, so its time constant is short and its temperature follows the mount. A cold plate is not optional at the top of the duty cycle. The mounting face is the heat path; treat it like one.
Mechanical
Don't preload the housing. The package holds optical alignment, and a distorted mount moves the beam. Use the specified mounting features, and check boresight after the first thermal cycle.
What to check first
Voltage at the module during the pulse, baseplate temperature at steady state, and trigger delay measured once. Those three catch most of the problems we hear about.
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