Laser / LLLT Headphones for Hair Loss -by Backspace

Laser headphones?!

Laser headphones?! Yeah, I know it's a silly idea but once I came up with the design I had to go through with it. The headphones are gimmicky but I couldn't afford to make a full blown helmet and I didn't like the hairbrush concepts. I also thought this would just be a fun project and it ended up working out pretty sweet. Hopefully this will spark some ideas for some better battery powered designs.

Materials:
-25 lasers (5mW 650nm)
-Permatex Flowable Silicone (4.5 oz)
-2 packs of BiC ultra round stick grip pens
-Play-doh
-Phone battery (3.6v 800mAh)
-Sony Headphones



Mold:
The mold was made by cutting up an old DVD case and taping the outside together with electrical tape. Play-doh is lining the bottom and 2cm indentations were made for spacing. The bic pens were cut up and stuck in the play-doh for the purpose of holding the laser modules. It's a perfect fit for this type of laser. Finally, just pour in the Permatex Silicone and let sit for 24 hours. Just make sure you use the Permatex 81730 "flowable" kind. The generic stuff at walmart/target is impossible to work with.

This is my first attempt at making a silicone mold, or any mold for that matter, so it's pretty ghetto. The play-doh stuck to the bottom of the silicone and it was a pain to clean off. It also made the spacers misshaped. To avoid the sticking problem I've read petroleum jelly can be placed on the mold to help it release easily. Also, play-doh fucking sucks so you might want to use something else.



Heres the silicone after it had been dried/removed. This picture is actually taken a few weeks after I started using it so it has formed to the shape of my head a bit. Two slots were left on the back part of the mold so I could just insert the top half of the headphones:



Heres the phone, charger, battery and laser cluster I am using:


Front and side view of headphones on, without lasers:




The battery was taken out of a wireless phone of mine and since I use that phone I also bought the Uniden DCX730 from buy.com (comes with battery and charger). Using google checkout at buy.com gives you a $10 discount, so it came out to about $19 shipped. Unfortunately, the battery didn't match the specs I had researched, it was only 500 mAh. I just swapped batteries between phones, so it all works out.

Batteries are rated in milliamp hours so if it has 800mAh listed it can only draw 800mA continually for 1 hour, 400mA for 2 hours, 200mA for 4 hours, etc. So the one I'm using can power the 25 lasers for a little over 1 hour (assuming the lasers draw 30mA each). If you plan on powering more lasers you'll need multiple battery packs so it could get expensive. It's an easy solution to power a small amount of lasers otherwise. Warning!: If you do plan on powering anything with batteries make sure you are extremely careful or fuse the power wire. If you get a short circuit the battery will melt, burn and/or explode!

-Backspace