Sam was stuck but found another pot...
"Then I realized there were 2 other pots next to the TEC drivers. (How could I have missed them??? One is hidden by the larger orange capacitor but it's still in full view when in person! Adjusting the one in the lower left corner finally had a dramatic effect - resulting in an output power of up to 14 mW with a decent beam profile. The other pot didn't seem to do anything. The laser is still not stable. It won't hold constant output power without fiddling with the pots every few minutes regardless of the mystery switch position, but it doesn't drop suddenly to 0.01 mW anymore. And two of four pots still don't seem to have any detectable effect on anything."
There are several possibilities including (1) the controller is broken,
(2) the laser head is broken, (3) both are broken, (4) the two non-functioning pots adjust parameters for some other laser that uses the same controller, and (5) I still have no clue about how to set this up!
http://www.repairfaq.org/sam/pr488c3i.jpg
The pots in this version of the black controller just have R numbers."
Phil Bergeron( AKA 142laser)