It's spring break and I am staying home, so I finally had a minute to build my groove. DX took two weeks to ship my parts ( I am using a bare kryton groove) and that was after a week and a half of backorder. 
First thoughts: The kryton barrel is awesome! But the head of my barrel wasn't beveled, and it really feels like the mounting hole is too small. I know it was left small for a number of different diodes, but I felt like I was damaging it as I pushed my diode in. Getting the little clip that holds the clicky switch in was a huge pain. I wish there was some other way, maybe a screw in retaining ring for future barrel versions?
My soldering iron was a little too hot and the resistor pads were too small, so the contacts and one of the pads on my groove driver let loose. This left me sad but determined to build a lm317 driver and cram it in the housing. The first one I built used a small round PCB inside the battery compartment as a contact. But I used a wire that was too thick, so it wouldn't coil up well. The driver was attached to the diode with stranded 22 ga wire, but when I went to screw it in, the + pin on diode #1 let loose. I was forced to destroy it in its extraction. So I ran to radioshack and picked up another 317 and started work on driver 2.
The second driver build went pretty well. I laid all of the components out and minimized the size. However, I assembled it with a 10 ohm resistor for the current regulation. Whoops! That means I'm somewhere around 150ma. I meant to use a 15 ohm, but in my haste I ignored the color bands. This diode probably won't last very long, but I will wait until it dies before I mess with anything, especially since my solder sucker broke.
Here is the finished product:
My camera doesn't do very well with this wavelength, so I will wait until it gets a little darker outside for beam shots. I'm pretty impressed!
First thoughts: The kryton barrel is awesome! But the head of my barrel wasn't beveled, and it really feels like the mounting hole is too small. I know it was left small for a number of different diodes, but I felt like I was damaging it as I pushed my diode in. Getting the little clip that holds the clicky switch in was a huge pain. I wish there was some other way, maybe a screw in retaining ring for future barrel versions?
My soldering iron was a little too hot and the resistor pads were too small, so the contacts and one of the pads on my groove driver let loose. This left me sad but determined to build a lm317 driver and cram it in the housing. The first one I built used a small round PCB inside the battery compartment as a contact. But I used a wire that was too thick, so it wouldn't coil up well. The driver was attached to the diode with stranded 22 ga wire, but when I went to screw it in, the + pin on diode #1 let loose. I was forced to destroy it in its extraction. So I ran to radioshack and picked up another 317 and started work on driver 2.
The second driver build went pretty well. I laid all of the components out and minimized the size. However, I assembled it with a 10 ohm resistor for the current regulation. Whoops! That means I'm somewhere around 150ma. I meant to use a 15 ohm, but in my haste I ignored the color bands. This diode probably won't last very long, but I will wait until it dies before I mess with anything, especially since my solder sucker broke.
Here is the finished product:
My camera doesn't do very well with this wavelength, so I will wait until it gets a little darker outside for beam shots. I'm pretty impressed!
