Properly Powering 9 Lasers

[farseen]

Hi There!


This is my first post on these forums and I'm super excited to have found them. Albeit, I'm a total noob to laser modification or anything of the sort, but that's why I'm here! To be surrounded by people like you guys

In a nutshell, I'm building a Lazer Harp for a Hotel. I'm an artist with a background in web design and development, but excuse my lack of knowledge with circuits.

The Lazer Harp will have two main pieces to it; the firing end, and the receiving end.

The receiving end we've got all worked out using an Arduino, Rasberry Pi and some laser receivers. This all works! Woo!

BUT!

Now I have to build the 8 or so lasers that are going to shoot (from about 10 ft away) at the receivers. I currently am using the following:

- Red 3.3-5V Lasers
- 9V 1A power supple (the one that came with our rasberry pi)
- Breadboard
- 2mm jack to power it from the 9V1A
- 10, 100, 150, 200k resistors

Basically, I keep burning out lasers! Well at least I'm pretty sure I am. I definitely burnt out an LED or two, haha. Can someone help me, in as plain eglish as possible, how to setup my breadboard with resistors to get these to work?

Do I need a 7805 5v regulator?

Thanks!

 

[Cyparagon]

I would go with 4 parallel sets of two in series (2S4P). This will give 4.5V to each of the lasers. This is under the assumption they have a dropping resistor, rather than a driver. Which lasers are you using? Do they have an integrated driver? It will also work if they have a driver, but one driver will end up dropping more voltage than the other.

No resistors or other ICs required, in theory.

You could also put them all in parallel, each with a 150Ω in series to drop the extra voltage.