is there a scanner testing board?

[laserwinkel]

hey,

i have orderd a bunch of scanners.
but now i am thinking that it would be easy if i had a simple external board where i can test the scanners speed with.

just need a board that has a ILDA input and some kind of power source for the scanners.
is there something like this premade anywhere?

Thanks in advance!

[The_Doctor]

I don't know of one ready made, but as scanners usually come with amps designed for them, I guess you mean small signals, so if you DC couple any kind of sound card (bypass its output caps and neutralise any DC offset that results) you can use an ILDA pattern converted to WAV file and play it through any player that plays WAV files. James Lehman made me one, I can either find the link for it or repost it if you want it. It's a multichannel WAV that has blanking as well as the X/Y channels.

The little USB sound cards that cost £15 or less from China are a useful starting point for this, if you are ok with some fiddly soldering and an op-amp addon circuit to get stronger signals and to remove the DC offset. It's probably better to go for a professional card, something like Echo's Mona or Gina 24-bit cards, if you can find a cheap one, especially as they will have a WDM driver that lets you control the sample rate in 1Hz increments to faster than most scanners will go, and likely has wiring that does NOT need you to remove DC offset after cap bypass. Further, those cards likely put out waves of over 10V if you ask them too, so you can adjust to suit any scan amp input with that kind of range. If you get that far you'll have a VERY useful bit of general lab gear too. These cards even have balanced outputs, which many scan amps use.

[drlava]

You could pick up a RIYA Mirco USB that has, in addition to USB control, an SD slot for stand-alone card playback which you can toggle through test frames (or play shows) from.

[buffo]

You could pick up a RIYA Mirco USB that has, in addition to USB control, an SD slot for stand-alone card playback which you can toggle through test frames (or play shows) from.

This is probably your best bet. You'll want to throw the ILDA test pattern and the LaserMedia test pattern at the scanners at a minimum, to ensure that they're tuned correctly, and you'll also need some way to verify the scan speed. That means using some sort of controller, and the Riya micro USB is about the cheapest stand-alone controller on the market right now that still supports loading your own frames onto the SD card for playback.

You could also use a sound-card DAC with a correction amp and some free software to do it, but that would be more cumbersome than the solution above, even though it would be slightly cheaper...

Adam

[VJ AIWAZ]

or something like this will work for you

http://www.jmlaser.com/products_engl...kurzinfo.html#

[buffo]

What's the price on that showplayer unit? Is it competitive with the Riya controller? (I'm pretty sure the Riya runs between $200 and $250...)

Adam

[VJ AIWAZ]

OK i take that back after further research its only has 16kps output

i think the the price is about $200ish

i actually have one but i only use it for beam shows so i forgot about the 16k thing

[drlava]

The RIYAs can run up to around 52 or 54kpps.. Send me a PM if you decide on one.

[300EVIL]

I built one of these for a cheap and dirty quad square. Works great for random testing and tuning.

http://www.photonlexicon.com/forums/...ht=quad+square