Hello, new and need some help.

Hi all, I've been lurking here for quite some time and finally bought a non-diode kit from Survival Lasers and a M104 diode from DRT. Put it together and it worked great despite my sloppy soldering job (I'm new to soldering and wound up having to just electrical tape over the solder point).

Anyway, didn't really do anything more the first night other then kinda focus it, and go outside and shine it up in the air for a few seconds (after checking to make sure no air traffic was around of course). Next morning, screwed around with it and burnt through a used up gift card and some electrical tape. Only really used it for a couple minutes, still all good.

Then I put the batteries on the charger (which showed green, for some reason as if the batteries were already charged), and went to work. Got home, put the batteries back in and now the dot starts pretty bright but very quickly fades. Didn't know what was up with that, and nothing "seemed" wrong with anything from what I could see. I noticed that after attempting to use it after taking it off the charger today (once again let it charge all day), I measured the voltage on it at 3.6 or so (Something reasonable, I'm getting pretty tired now so hard time thinking), but then after throwing the batteries into the laser and turning it on after it dimmed I pulled them out and the voltage dropped on them to 2.5 volts.

I'm not an electrical engineer or anything so I'm not exactly sure "what' I should be looking for to fix it at this point. Any ideas would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Daniel

batteries off the charger should be roughly 4.2V iirc and that all depends on the batteries you have. which batteries are these you speak of? also keep in mind you will not get a long lase time out of batteries before you need to charge them again. the laser driver need XXX volts and when the battery drops below xxx then it will no longer lase.

correction to your original post, M140 not m104 but thats a small detail

Heh. Sorry, stress has been leading to a lack of sleep (this is my sit down and relax project at the moment) so I'm forgetting things.

The batteries are RCR123A.

Brand? Rc123a are the same as 16340s

Ultrafire 3.6V