Hi all -
This is my first post so I will do my best to not break etiquette!
I'm working on a simple electronics project that requires me to power two 3 volt lasers with a total of 2 AA batteries.
The lasers are a bit of a black box. The company would only tell me they operate on 3 volts (they sell a no-frills, two AA battery pack to operate a single laser) and that they have some form of linear regulator inside. Combined they draw about 430 mA with a fresh battery, dropping down to a combined 250 or so mA at the point the batteries will no longer power the pair...and that's all the detail I have on the laser circuits. I've attempted to disassemble but they seem to be epoxied in place...no visible fasteners, no rotation for a threaded insert etc.
One of the requirements though is that both lasers need to output roughly the same intensity light up until shutoff from a low battery. Currently one laser will begin to dim before the other when the batteries are about to fail. So Im wondering if there's some low-overhead method (keeping in mind that I cannot gain access to the laser circuitry, just the power leads) that I could use to ensure each laser receives the same current until the battery can no longer supply it and both lasers turn off?
The person who developed the project ahead of me combined a BA30BC0 LDO and another part in a SOT-223-like package marked "TK 4DG" which I have not been able to identify, to address the problem. Im told that the lasers did in fact start failing to power basically in unison (at the cost of overall battery life) but Im too much of a novice to have a guess at what that part is/does. The addition of the BA30BC0 also strikes me as pointless given the internal LDOs....but again Im a novice with electronics and havent done anything battery powered. Aside from some obvious decoupling these are the only two parts outside the laser housings...there seem to be too many things that come in a package like that and Im not getting anything useful searching for TK 4DG. I have found mention of something called a current mirror, but I think it's not quite what Im looking for, and current mirror ICs I've found are for outputs on the order of 50 - 100mA.
Thank you for an guidance!
This is my first post so I will do my best to not break etiquette!
I'm working on a simple electronics project that requires me to power two 3 volt lasers with a total of 2 AA batteries.
The lasers are a bit of a black box. The company would only tell me they operate on 3 volts (they sell a no-frills, two AA battery pack to operate a single laser) and that they have some form of linear regulator inside. Combined they draw about 430 mA with a fresh battery, dropping down to a combined 250 or so mA at the point the batteries will no longer power the pair...and that's all the detail I have on the laser circuits. I've attempted to disassemble but they seem to be epoxied in place...no visible fasteners, no rotation for a threaded insert etc.
One of the requirements though is that both lasers need to output roughly the same intensity light up until shutoff from a low battery. Currently one laser will begin to dim before the other when the batteries are about to fail. So Im wondering if there's some low-overhead method (keeping in mind that I cannot gain access to the laser circuitry, just the power leads) that I could use to ensure each laser receives the same current until the battery can no longer supply it and both lasers turn off?
The person who developed the project ahead of me combined a BA30BC0 LDO and another part in a SOT-223-like package marked "TK 4DG" which I have not been able to identify, to address the problem. Im told that the lasers did in fact start failing to power basically in unison (at the cost of overall battery life) but Im too much of a novice to have a guess at what that part is/does. The addition of the BA30BC0 also strikes me as pointless given the internal LDOs....but again Im a novice with electronics and havent done anything battery powered. Aside from some obvious decoupling these are the only two parts outside the laser housings...there seem to be too many things that come in a package like that and Im not getting anything useful searching for TK 4DG. I have found mention of something called a current mirror, but I think it's not quite what Im looking for, and current mirror ICs I've found are for outputs on the order of 50 - 100mA.
Thank you for an guidance!