Questionable Rayfoss drivers.

Hey guys.

Jeffreythe00 here sent me a red laser he had to repair, because it went dead just like that.

Now, it was a Rayfoss reddie laser powered by single 16340 battery.

This, I believe:
www.rayfoss.com

Now, problem.
First, taking it apart is a pain. It has a small brass piece which holds the diode, and it's pressfited and firmly glued into place, inside the host.

I had to machine it out, cannot hammer the brass piece out. Tried.

Made new direct pressfit heatsink for it,

But here's the problem.

Just today I got to cut open the heatshrink tubing around the driver(?):



Back side? What back side?


Not even an output capacitor, guys. Not even that.

Will see what can I do with the driver, possibly re-use it somehow. Add cap, possibly input diode to drop input voltage when powered by 16340 instead of intended CR123 presumably ...

Anyhow. Don't buy this.

I've driven a red off of a single chip driver before. That one, I don't recognize, but also it has a few resistors too. Not defending it, because my LOC setup died within 6 months, but that could have been anything, this was definitely not meant to be assembled this way for so long, more of a proof of concept that I never got around to disassembling. Setup had magnets as battery connections, and the chip was "floating" between the anode and cathode wires inside the aixiz module.

Yeah but... this!

Man, look at the soldering on the components, it's hand made. And exeptionally shitty.

Board terribly designed, as if some retarded software auto-routed it.

I'm trying to get it to work still. So far it's like open circuit. Perhaps driver itself died, dunno. Diode was dead either way.

Well, working reliably as far as I can tell.

Here's a picture:
http://i690.photobucket.com/albums/vv263/Eudaimonium/P5050362.jpg

Also, here are some side kicking pictures just for the hell of it:

WTF mates?

That's fairly messed up huh? I know I've seen/heard of multiple red's in this style dying after a unreasonable amount of time. Just dying.

Guess that mystery has been solved!

Yup.

The picture of the driver there with capacitor added, I also added small heatsink to the transistor there, and wrapped the entire thing in heatshrink tubing again to hold it in place.

Works like a charm now, measured 160mW , with draw of 290mA out of the battery.

Guess that's low-ish but it's only a plastic lens in there (AR coated but still).