thought I killed my diode today

I have my diode still partially mounted in the dvd burner heatsink sitting inside a battery case and accidently bumped the power switch while in my pocket when I pulled it out several minutes later it was very warm and only had a faint red dot I switched it off and on again a few minutes later back to normal and still ran it for a minute so I dont think it was the battery the lens is plastic and if you look at it closely it appears to have some mark on it(scratch) witch gives me a slight eliptical shape at a distance but the results of it going dim almost suggests there is some sort of protection in the diode itself but is this possible? in the early stages of my experiments I ran this diode on just 3xaa NiMH with a series diode without incident but maybe I was lucky here

Anyone here have any suggestions as to why this may of happened juding by the temp of the plastic case I could safely assume the temp of the diode and heatsink ~40 C

That's the value of a current-limiting driver. Even though the diode overheated (and would naturally try to suck more juice to keep its output high) the driver prevented it from doing so, and although it looked bad at first, it may have just saved your diode' life.

Thanks greyfox

So as the diode got warmer it would need more current to produce the same amount of light? and as I only supplied a limited amount of current of around 200mA it could not get the required amount of current needed
Does the forward voltage of the diode also change as the voltage increases or does it stay the same (mine is about 3v1 ?

The same thing happended to me as well today. Somehow it got swtiched on in the back seat of my car. Drove over 25 miles to my destination before looking back to seeing a red glow. So it was on solid for over 15 min. or so. It was very hot to the touch. Felt like a battery after a very fast charge. Simply amazing that it still works, and also amazing that it was not focused more since my seats are black leather and did not burn them! I'm running it straight with 2 AAA batteries, so that shows that the Senkat LD's will hold up more than they are given credit for.

m3-dude said:

The same thing happended to me as well today.  Somehow it got swtiched on in the back seat of my car.  Drove over 25 miles to my destination before looking back to seeing a red glow.  So it was on solid for over 15 min. or so.  It was very hot to the touch.  Felt like a battery after a very fast charge.   Simply amazing that it still works, and also amazing that it was not focused more since my seats are black leather and did not burn them!  I'm running it straight with 2 AAA batteries, so that shows that the Senkat LD's will hold up more than they are given credit for.

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It will last..
But only for about 5 days tops. :-/