Laser Voltage

Hi! I recently recieved a red 5mW laser from an ebay seller which had a defective lens. I took the laser apart and did some adjustments and it's now working fine. I made a new host from some tubing and a switch I had at home. However, the way the host is made it's not that easy to change the batteries. So what I wonder is if I can extend the battery life so I don't have to change them very often.

Would it harm the laser if I drive it with 3x AA (1,5V), instead of 2xAAA (1,5V) which it was designed for? Is there some other configuration I can use to extend the battery life, while not doing any damage to the diode?

3xAA, 2x A or 2x 9V is probably the largest I can fit in the host.

Thank you for reading

Use the same voltage but Higher Capacity batteries.
By using 3 batteries you are increasing the supply
voltage by 50%.

I would assume the manufacturer of the Laser designed
the Driver to only take 3Volts and not 4.5Volts.
That again depends on the Driver design.


Jerry

You can contact us at any time on our Website: J.BAUER Electronics

I agree with Jerry stick to 3V. If you can fit 2 9V batteries in it, what you can do is break the 9V's apart getting the 6 AAAA's out of them, and then set them up two in series and the rest parallel. This would give you 3V and a higher capacity.

The problem is you're only using a small part of the cells' capacity since low power reds like that don't have a driver. Using a driver (buck/boost in this case) would give you a run time of up to 40 hours with 2xAAA and up to 100 hours with 2xAA.

But jeez, really? All this trouble for a <5mW PVC tube?