Hey everyone, I'm looking for some help identifying the sensors used in some standard laser detector units.
I have two units here which detect the spinning red laser from a rotary laser. I am looking to buy some of the sensors used in these detectors for use in my own project. However, I can't seem to find anything similar to the sensors on the internet.
If you zoom into the sensor on the NWi unit, you can see that the sensor panel is made up of two elements split in the middle. The operation of this unit is very simple. When the laser is hitting the lower half of the sensor, the display shows an up arrow and vice versa for the top half. When the laser is right in the middle and hitting both halves, the unit displays level. The thin silver piece running vertically must be some sort of photo diode as it produces a voltage of about 20mV when a light is shined directly on it. I have searched through pretty much all of Mouser's and and Digikey's photo diodes and found nothing similar. All of the photo diodes I have found are in small round packages which is not convenient for detecting a spinning laser as they are very small and seem to be very dependent on the angle that the light hits them. The sensors on the laser detector units are able to detect the laser even at angles over 45 degrees.
The Topcon unit is a little more complicated as the up and down arrows on the display grow larger and smaller as you raise the unit up and down. If you zoom in onto that sensor you can see that each half of the sensor has 4 small wires in it which are spaced evenly at the middle and meet at the ends. This obviously creates some type of variable output depending on where the laser is. I have not tested the output from this sensor but I imagine it works in a similar way to the other one.
I am not looking for something as fancy as the variable sensor in the Topcon unit. If anyone has some idea as to what the linear photo diode type elements in the NWi unit are, that would be very helpful.
Thanks