backstory: pt-54 became popular because it was part of the "leftovers" of harvesting certain projectors for their new InGaN high wavelength diodes. This discovery basically brought down the consumer price of these single diodes from several thousand dollars to ~$50.
those laser nerds *were* just throwing these things away until someone decided to make a light out of them. Apparently, they didn't notice that these things were friggin awesome.... I mean, not as awesome as the beautiful, and as of yet still unknown, InGaN direct injection laser diodes, but awesome in their own, sheer output sort of way.
The builder, jayrob, recently joined here (bout time, I noticed a marked increase in his interest in incoherent non-monochromatic light builds, tsk tsk tsk
), and is known at lpf for offering very intuitive all-in-one kits for building your own custom photon stick.