The housing used to be made from brass. Likely the new models are made from some kind of cheap, lightweight alloy.
I like the idea of USB rechargeable lasers. I've built one using a USB charging circuit from Adafruit. They use miniUSB or USB-C which is more convenient for me. The problem is that the size of the Adafruit PCB is too large for a compact laser, like a pen. They make smaller LiPo charging circuits but those appear to function only as a charger and don't have connections to wire a device on the battery output.
Is the charging circuit of this laser integrated into the laser diode driver or is it separate? It appears to be integrated.
It is integrated. If you want other shoots just let me know. I still have it in the draver till i am waiting for the diode to be delivered. (China)
its nice driver. 90mA stock. Replacing or adding resistor in parallel can make it more powerful. zenodilodon on youtube modified those drivers up to 1w.. i like to double stock mA. but obviously they are capable..
So for 8eur we have host.
Driver.
Battery is obviously trash, i would say 150mah max. but still. If it powers my build for an hour. Or just half. Its not that bad.