Explosion or what? I hate batteries for lasers.

Hello!

So I have a 200mW violet from DealExtreme and I always unmount my lasers after use to make sure the life gets longer so today I had a friend over at my house and I wanted to show it, I put in the batteries and screwed it halfway and clicked the button and "poff", some powder falled of it, it got f***** hot and I dropped it on my bed. I thought it was broken but after a couple of minutes it had cooled down so I took out the batteries and tried the other way around with the batteries and it worked.

What happened? Was it a explosion?

I've also got some criticism to all the laser makers - keep it to one side!!!!!!!!! All lasers have different ways of putting the batteries in, shouldn't the minus side of batteries ALWAYS go towards the spring - no matter the electronical device? Well, it seems lasers are an exception. Flashlights, remote controls et cetera, all of them have the same way - but lasers!? Whyyyyyy??

I'm so scared everytime I put in batteries into my lasers! And then the overvolting situation... Why can't they take to much power? It's just some light with an lens in front of it..

I ruined my Spartan 1W by giving it 3.7V batteries and it also had some strange explosion sound when starting it (first after 20 minutes I found a spartan review telling that if you use a 3.7V, your laser is gone). $239 for nothing there, what the heck? (If anyone knows if there is a fix, please tell me)

Thanks.

Yes, the fix is using the right batteries and installing them correctly. :na:

Except from what Ghostchrome said which is very correct,
another idea is to take a marker and put a + on the correct side,
so when you will have to put batteries back in you will always know.
If you ask what i do, i have very good memory so i always remember
the pollarity of all my +10 lasers.

Jim