So crazy news! Yesterday I took apart a dvd burner and found a diode that looked like a LPC815, but x16. So I went to radio shack and bought components to built an LM317 driver using this schematic.
The driver worked great! I got a steady 5.3 ohms, the desired number being 5 (+/- .5) ohms and attached some leads to connect to a 8.4v nimh battery. The voltage was regulated down to 2.8v as desired, and leads were successfully attached to the diode. Once we turned down the variable resistor to 0 ohms and let the normal resistors take over, the laser was completely unfocused, but outputted enough red to burn a little dip through a cd case at point blank with most of the red not on point. Since the diode looked like this.
It didn't seem to have a lens to focus it at all, is that part of the design of that particular diode. However, our poorest mistake was not putting the diode in an axiz module, and sadly, the diode overheated due to not having any heatsinking, and now outputs very little red. (I suspect an axiz module does
some heatsinking, otherwise what makes it necessarily other than focusing, protection?) I may buy a PHR-805T in a module and turn up the ohms on the variable ohm resistor so it supply's 120mA instead of 250mA. Can someone tell me if not installing the diode in a module is what killed it, or was it the circuit. Everything on the multimeter seemed to be what we wanted, even though I couldn't measure mA, other things like ohm's, volts, and connectivity seemed correct. I just don't want to kill a $18 diode, I believe my driver works for 405nm.