What if....?

[usakicksass]

Bluray diodes, as many of you may have noticed, are heat sensitive. Too much heat for too long and they degrade to a small LED. What if we installed a closed loop thermocouple design to shut off the power supply when a predetermined heat was reached. I know this is possible but the units I use in the course of my work are about 1"X 1" X 3". That is too large for a laser pointer and they use 110Volt.

 

[styropyro]

Some voltage and current regulators has thermal shutdown built in so it shuts off the power when they get too hot, so building it into a laser shouldn't be too hard if you look up schematics for something like that. The problem is is that in a pointer there is already limited space so putting in another circuit may be a challenge. It would probably be a lot easier if you could fit some small TECs inside the pointer, but then you would have to machine out places in the heatsink to stick in the TECs.