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ArcticMyst Security by Avery

Help please! Broken blue/violet laser pen

Joined
Jul 2, 2010
Messages
2
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0
Hey all,

First time posting, what a great forum!

Here's the story...

When i was a wee little lad, just kidding... My GF ordered me a kaleidoscopic blue/violet laser pointer from china (no brand name or anything worth any information other than which way the batteries should face) and it broke, obviously, but it did so in multiple steps. While rotating the lens to get the kaleidoscope effect I noticed that the assembly holding the kaleidoscopic part was also rotating. Also when removing the kaleidoscopic part the whole unit would rotate...

Anyway, occasionally the entire laser pointer head would come off leaving behind just the casing and the batteries. When it did, a black wire was visible that was soldered to the board on one end and was stripped and free floating on the other. It appeared as if the stripped end was designed to contact the metal casing that held the laser diode as a means of bringing the positive end of the batter from the casing to the circuit board. I would reassemble the laser pointer in the manner that i just described and the laser pointer worked fine. It would periodically fall out and I would have to do this again and it fixed it every time.

Well, one day my GF had it fall apart on her and she tried to do what I did to fix it except that she had no idea what i was doing and just tried this and that to mimic what she saw me doing and now it doesn't work at all. When I opened it up i noticed that the stripped portion of wire was no longer there, as if she had accidentally ripped them off or that the wires potentially burnt up if she shorted it out (not sure if 2 AA batteries would burn up wire though). One more thing to add is that when I opened it i saw the black wire located inside the brass colored metal that has the 3 wires leading into it from the circuit board. Not sure if this could have potentially completed a circuit and fried something...

So i stripped the wire again and when i try to do the method that i described before no light comes out whatsoever. I tried using a DMM to see if anything made sense to me but I'm completely lost. I also tried to power it as described via using tape and batteries to remove the casing from the circuit but still no light whatsoever.


With all that said, does anyone have any suggestions on how to diagnose what is wrong? My fear is that she fried a component while guessing around but I don't know what to look for with the DMM...

Thanks in advance!

Pictures explanation- In all the pictures, the side of the circuit board that is nearest to the spring you may be able to see 2 holes. One of the holes is unoccupied and the other is a full of solder. The one that has solder in it is where the black wire was attached that had fallen off. I resoldered it and tried to have it make contact with the brass(?) cylinder as to complete the circuit with the batteries. When I had original gotten it and it would fall apart and I would resemble, I would just run the black wire from where it was soldered on the circuit board and place the exposed wires on the other end of the black wire onto the brass cylinder would reassemble and it worked perfectly (reference picture #3, the black wire was soldered to bottom right corner section of circuit board and wrapped over the electronics and around the brass cylinder).
 

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NRG

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Joined
Jul 23, 2010
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If it is not that expensive or powerful, just buy another one.
 
Joined
May 10, 2009
Messages
379
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28
The inductor coil looks to be damaged, the top is chipped pretty bad. It could have severed the fine wire of the coil. Many things could be the cause of failure though. Have you tried powering without using the host. What I mean is make the connections to the driver with some gator clips or something attatched to a battery holder without using the brass host. This way you can be sure you have a good connection then try powering up. Good luck! One other option is to de-solder the diode from the driver and try powering it with a simple DDL driver set to low current to start (25ma), do some searching on DDL you should be able to find lots of info. Best of luck to you!
 




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