Laser Projector (Red, Green, Purple) "Laser 3D Party Light" from Spencer's

[james]

Thank you. Yes. I checked all that.

I will try all of this on another PC running good old XP!

James.

[smokinjoe]

Hello all,

I have been working with the Spencers laser for a few weeks now and was happy to see this post. I have done the laser alignment and a few other basic mods to get color reproduction more accurate on my projector. I really thought this laser was neat when I first saw it in the store, and I cannot leave anything alone so it came apart as soon as it got home. I knew there was some potential to be had when I saw the SD card inside and immediately began to play. I had no clue what an ild. file was and am still learning, but a quick google search turned up some sample animations. I took a minute to learn the secret of the .prg file, but I sorted it out in a short time. I am impressed at the multiple number of colors this thing can generate once aligned and tweaked! I use CorelDraw on a daily basis to generate artwork and vector drawings to use in an Epilogue Helix laser cutter/engraver. I am really excited to use CorelDraw to make some animation frames. I have been playing with a few of the freeware programs out there and hope to get some time to play over the holiday break. Work just gets in the way of too much cool stuff like playing with freakin laser beams.

For a quick and dirty alignment of the someflungdung laser that Spencers sells, try using the "countdown clock" graphic as an aid. If you set the switch to pause on this graphic, all of the beams should converge on the second hand axis point. I don’t know if this is an all-around great way to align, but it seems to have worked pretty good for me.

I will post a link to a video of my toy in action soon. I again would like to thank everyone for their posts and hope this thing continues to evolve. I am a R&D engineering tech for a company that is a leader in nuclear medical imaging and love honing my skills playing with stuff like this!

Thanks again!
Joe

[tribble]

Edit: Nice pic! I wanted to make a vortex, though I don't think I would have had time to make anything cool before losing the fog. I've never really messed with beam shows on it since I use it in my basement (no fog machine or anything).

That's weird about the card... though unless you copy/pasted wrong, they look identical in size (1,006,616,576 Bytes vs. 1,006,616,576 Bytes). BTW, is the 4GB card SDHC, or just SD?

Thanks! I think that's actually one of the built-in graphics; the circle made out of rectangles. I have found some ILD shows in the FTP area here and, although I haven't tried syncing them to their music, they do make pretty beams. :-)

I don't know if the 4GB card is SDHC or not. It doesn't say anything one way or the other. The label is identical to the 1GB card except the number "4" in front of the "GB." Yes, even the tinytype number is the same!

[tribble]

Hey Smokinjoe, welcome to the thread! Always fun to welcome another hobbyist. :-)

[tribble]

OK, I had a bit of a procedural/mental breakthrough tonight with LaserBoy and the Spencer projector, and I just had to share!

Maybe I was being a dolt, but I was saving my static images (text, figures, whatever) as ONE FRAME. Because of the way the Spencer projector works (as DogP documented with his o-scope), there is a brief pause between showing the last frame of an .ild and the next frame of the same (if repeating) or next (if not repeating or repetitions are exhausted) .ild file. If your .ild file has only one frame, even if you repeat it 100 times or put the switch in mode 2, you're going to have nasty flicker due to the frame reload process. You can do much better!

All I did was use LaserBoy to duplicate the static frame a few hundred times with the ` key in one of the drawing menus (I think I use the 'k' menu.) Voila! Much less flicker!

I am still experimenting with optimal LB settings to 'optimize' for the Spencer projector. I have had reasonable luck lowering the max dwell from 333uS to 100-150 and increasing the max vector length to ~2000. Still playing; these settings probably have different optimal settings for different frames.

One thing I have not figured out how to do is make LB remove 'extra' points along a curve brought in with bmp2ild or other imported .ild art.

Having fun!

[james]

One thing I have not figured out how to do is make LB remove 'extra' points along a curve brought in with bmp2ild or other imported .ild art.

Having fun!

If you look in the [Tab] menu, option "1 insignificant angle in degrees" is the angle that is considered to be so close to zero that it can be removed from the drawing. By this tolerance, straight lines in vector art with many points along them can be reduced to a simple vector.

Increasing this value will remove more points in curves. This can be very destructive to some forms of vector art!

The next option, "2 insignificant distance in points" is for consecutive vertices placed very close to each other. At some minimal distance, they should be considered the same point. This does not apply to overlapping areas of the whole drawing.

Points are in units of displacement within signed short integer space, -32767 to +32767.

Option "7 what to do with dots" can be useful for cleaning up vector art from other sources, especially DXF files. (remove dots).

Options 3 and 4 are also in points of distance or displacement. That is the maximum distance between each added vertex in an optimized vector image. With this you can control the maximum velocity of the scanners for lit segments and blanking paths independently. Lower numbers add more points along the lines and will scan slower.

The sharpest angle in a drawing is 180 degrees. Option "5 maximum dwell in microseconds" is the amount of time to dwell for 180 degrees. Lesser angles will have less dwell. It is based on the timing of samples at option "f output wave sample rate". The default value is 48K, or 1/48K seconds per sample.

I have no idea what that internal DAC clock rate is.

Ultimately scan velocity will be determined by scan angle as well as point displacement in the art.

James.

[tribble]

Thanks, James! Is there a LB manual somewhere that I can read? I hate to keep littering threads with support questions, but I have so many. I looked at your forums, but if there is a consolidated instruction overview I missed it.

[james]

Feel free to post to your heart's content on the LaserBoy forum.

There is no official manual for LaserBoy.

Maybe some day.

[DogP]

I don't know if the 4GB card is SDHC or not. It doesn't say anything one way or the other.

Yeah, it's probably not SDHC then.

Hey Smokinjoe, welcome to the thread! Always fun to welcome another hobbyist. :-)

Yes, welcome!

All I did was use LaserBoy to duplicate the static frame a few hundred times with the ` key in one of the drawing menus (I think I use the 'k' menu.) Voila! Much less flicker!

Yep... apparently the MCU isn't smart enough to anticipate what's happening on the .prg. Though, just a suggestion... static frames are kinda boring - LaserBoy has some really cool effects. If you do output -> ild -> ild generate & save frame effect, there's a lot of options. In my animation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Drd8kk51vmM , at 0:45, I did the "rotate" effect (saves as rotate.ild), and did a "break" with the last frame. And at 3:23, I did the save frame _SET_ effect, with a blend. And I used "move_l2r" a couple times too.

One thing I have not figured out how to do is make LB remove 'extra' points along a curve brought in with bmp2ild or other imported .ild art.

What James said is correct (of course), but another thing to do is set the bit resolution. The DAC is only 8 bits, so if you have a lot of points close together, the .ild file tells the DAC to generate those points, but they all end up being the same point, due to the resolution. First, in the 't' menu, it tells how many bits to mask - set x and y to 8, and the rest don't really matter. In the 'h' menu, do <shift>+8 to impose bit resolution on all the frames. Then I usually minimize all (<shift>+i). That should get rid of any points that landed on top of each other. Then I optimize.

DogP

[james]

DogP, Nice show!