Raspberry Pi

[polishedball]

Did you mod both the ins and the outs?

If you modded the ins, you can record the output of any laser DAC. Get a computer sound device that takes ADAT LightPipe. Then you can transcribe your recordings to hard drive and make them into multi-channel waves. Those waves will open as full color vector art in LaserBoy!

Yes both sides fully modded, one the quick dirty way per \doc, and one the DrLava way. I did the mods for him.

[JohnYayas]

James, have you ever looked into the mono project? I just started using it and it's quite amazing. You can target Linux, android, ios, etc. Could be a very nice wrapper around LaserBoy!

[james]

Gary, you obviously know a whole lot more about C# than I do!

I've just looked this up right now. Never heard of it before.

What would you think about trying to wrap some C# around the LaserBoy core?

Or, at least talking to me about it.

James.

[JohnYayas]

I don't have time to work on extra projects due to the back log of my own. But, I can talk about it. I have Skype and need to buy a headset anyway. C# is very similar to C++ so you would have no problem writing code. MonoDevelop has a GUI for creating forms. I am not sure how you would be able to use your frame buffer with it but if you had to I would imagine that you could use something like OpenGL for the rendering. You could use mono to handle the keyboard input and mouse events and simply forward them to your LaserBoy! engine. I have never looked at your code to see how your drawing works so I can't really say.

I am not exactly sure how interfacing between .NET and native C++ is done in mono. I know exactly how to do it using Microsoft tools and I imagine it is similar. Also, I don't know how much storage and memory the Rasberry Pi has so I am not sure if that would be a good platform for this or not. But, it would definitely work well on Windows, Linux, or Apple which is really only what people would be using it on, anyway. You could definitely shut up some of the naysayers by doing this and learn something new (and very useful) in the process.

[james]

What do you think the advantage would be to use Mono?

LaserBoy already compiles and runs in Windows, Mac OSX and Linux (and all others supported by libSDL).

James.

[swamidog]

a modern gui.

What do you think the advantage would be to use Mono?

LaserBoy already compiles and runs in Windows, Mac OSX and Linux (and all others supported by libSDL).

James.

[james]

Well... I suppose.

I could use FLTK or WxWidgets or something else like that.

I kinda like the idea that almost everything going on is right there in the code that I wrote that comes with it.

That is the very reason why it was so easy to get it to work on the Raspberry Pi!

Probably the most inconvenient thing about LaserBoy is the fact that it does not navigate the file system. You have to move all your files into the right folders inside of the LaserBoy directory.

[FutureDesign]

James, what about porting laserboy to QT? You then have cross compiling between OSX, Linux and windows. You have openGL, tons of widgets and a great debugging environment.
You could in a matter of hours / days move laserboy into this century, with a nice skinnable GUI :-D
Next step would be realtime output. Thats easy using QT. You can still hold on to your WAVE approach, however just with an internal player.
I would be a nice and swift upgrade :-D

[JohnYayas]

What do you think the advantage would be to use Mono?

LaserBoy already compiles and runs in Windows, Mac OSX and Linux (and all others supported by libSDL).

James.

There are advantages and disadvantages. It's probably easier than QT or FLTK (in fact there is a mono wrapper around FLTK) to learn. It will offer you some features that you won't find in C++ or at least much more convenient to use. Disadvantages are that you lose completely native code and it requires the mono libraries. Personally, if it was me, I'd stay all in C++ and do it in QT. But, you have not done that although you know about QT and are strongly aware of requests for a modern UI. So, maybe you don't care and this is a pointless discussion.

[james]

No. It's not a pointless discussion.

My thoughts are that I like the idea that the window that LaserBoy opens can be any size. I like the idea that all of it is used to display vector art. I don't want to use any of that space for anything else. I realize that the area of interest is a square and I have the part on the side to work with. That might work into something in the future. But it needs to scale well with the whole window.

I don't use any graphics accelerators or calls to the GPU, like OpenGL. I do all the 3D vector math in my code. All I do is make a memory map of the pixels on the screen and copy that to the area inside the window. That's a big part of what makes LaserBoy Generic C++ that compiles on just about anything.

If I did write code for the mouse, it would only allow you to choose items from the menus. I still want keyboard control of the actions that effect the vector art. I really like the idea that you can set things like move-points-per-key-hit or rotate-degrees-per-key-hit, etc. If you know what your settings are, you can count your key taps and you always know where you are. You can't do that kind of precise manipulation with a mouse.

For one thing, the space that the vectors live in is 65535 pixels cubed. That's 3D and it's way bigger than what you can see on a 2D raster screen. There is no way a mouse can manipulate that space directly with any accuracy.

If I did write my own code, to work in SDL, to track and trap the mouse, it would probably end up being about half or more of the whole code set.

I just don't think it would add any real functionality to LaserBoy that isn't already there.

As far as live output goes, yes, I am interested in that. I'm not sure how I would do it or what it would do. One of the reasons is that you can create vector art in LaserBoy that is not at all optimized. Single vectors can stretch clear across the viewing area. That's fine for making new art. Once you have what you want you can optimize it in many different ways with different optimization factors. There are all kinds of steps in the process of making original art that have no business being sent to the laser projector.

There is also the problem of being able to access a 6 or 8 channel sound device directly in all the different operating systems.

James.