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

  1. #1
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    Default Laser Projector (Red, Green, Purple) "Laser 3D Party Light" from Spencer's

    Hey,

    First time poster, but long time dreamer of owning an RGB laser projector. Anyway, while I was at the mall the other day I dropped into Spencer's, and a laser projector making arbitrary images caught my eye (much cooler than the normal laser kaleidoscopes that they usually have). I wasn't sure that it was worth the $200 price tag, so I went home and researched it. I ended up finding out that it was actually marked down to $169, and that there really aren't many full color laser projectors cheaper than that.

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    So I went and bought it, planning on disassembling it and hopefully hacking it to be controlled by a microcontroller or maybe a PC. When I opened it up, I noticed it had an SD card in it! I popped it into the computer and found .ild files and a .prg text file sequencing the .ild files.

    This is the projector on Spencer's site: http://www.spencersonline.com/produc...r-party-light/

    I'm an electrical engineer, and my main hobby interest is classic video games, especially arcade games... I have about 40 arcade/pinball machines in my basement ( http://www.projectvb.com/arcade/ ). Several of the arcade games are vector games (like Tempest, Star Wars, Gravitar, etc)... and I think it'd be REALLY cool to play these games on the projector. I remember seeing a video of Tempest being played on LaserMAME a LONG time ago, though I don't see that happening on this projector.

    What I would like to do is create a .ild file of several sequences from arcade games, like the Gravitar title screen (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyQX_SokUPk @ 0:10), and project it on the ceiling in my arcade. Anyone have any tips? I've found several applications for creating frames for .ild files, and .bmp converters, but I imagine a smarter method would be to just draw the vectors as the vector display does, rather than rasterizing, then re-vectorizing. Has anyone done anything like this?

    I'll post some disassembled pics, and technical details in a follow-up post shortly, in case anyone's interested.

    Thanks,
    DogP
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  2. #2
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    nice, I think I saw that basement arcade page on KLOV or somewhere can't remember..

    nice collection of machines, I only collect pins personally

    have BOP, DE:SW, GoldenEye, ToTAN, BF, SP, SWEP1, BSD, SMB

    anywho, your best bet is to re-vector the images, that I am aware of lazymame has no way to export to a file

    only way you could do it at all would be to "play" the game into an ADAT machine and then use an LD2000 system from Pangolin with LC-ADAT to recapture the laser information... so basically, more trouble than its worth really

    but remember those scanners are probably not going to be so great so you want to keep the complexity down to a minimum

  3. #3
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    Here are a few pics of the unit:

    Back panel, with the power switch, mode switch (music activated, pause on current .ild file, or auto cycle according to .prg), and "focus", which is sort of a zoom... it runs off +/- 15V.
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    Back pulled off
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    Pulled apart, microphone is attached to the front of the case
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    Standard SD Card, requires FAT32 format
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    Main controller board
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    XY driver board
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    On the SD card, the .prg file has a line like:
    Aurora51.ild,10,1
    or
    Aurora26.ild,10,2,i
    Of course the first field is the file name of the .ild file. The second field is the speed... I'm not sure what the units are, but increasing the number decreases flicker, but reduces the image quality (lines and edges get more rounded). The third field is the number of times to repeat, and the optional fourth field looks to ignore color (seems to make the pattern white).

    And if you run it without an SD card, it goes through a long sequence of built in patterns, which I believe are the patterns that play in music mode (those aren't on the SD card AFAIK).

    I've seen a lot of talk about the ILDA test pattern, so I decided to try a 12K test pattern, and post it here for comparison.

    Image of one of the included animations
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    12K ILDA test pattern at the largest zoom, and speed 15
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    12K ILDA test pattern zoomed to the size of the inner box of the above image, and speed 15
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    12K ILDA test pattern, again zoomed to the size of the inner box of the above image, and speed 15
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    Overall, the unit seems pretty nice, especially for the price. The metal case is solid and easily disassembled. The image quality certainly isn't perfect (slowing it down and making it smaller makes it better).

    I really want to tweak those pots on the XY board, but I'm not familiar with the adjustments. Any tips, or does anyone know what those pots are likely to adjust? Of course I'd mark the location and note the number of turns so I can go back. I assume their calibration at the factory isn't perfect, though probably better than an unexperienced person like myself can do without some pointers. I am familiar with making similar adjustments on CRTs though.

    It looks very similar to some of the other Chinese laser projectors (like http://www.ebay.com/itm/SD-Card-500m...item4169e65c21 ), and has some unused headers. I'm guessing the LCD1 and LCD2 headers are for connecting a standard HD44780 LCD. J5 is probably buttons for the panel, and J2 may be the sensitivity pot (though I haven't really looked at the circuit to verify any of this). There's also an In-Circuit Emulator port. I also dunno whether these unused ports are active, or whether they have different firmware loaded for the LCD versions.

    Anyway, I'd appreciate any info anyone has, and hopefully someone finds this interesting or useful. The only other post I was able to find about this was here: http://www.photonlexicon.com/forums/...es-help-please .

    Thanks,
    DogP

  4. #4
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    Quote Originally Posted by flecom View Post
    nice, I think I saw that basement arcade page on KLOV or somewhere can't remember..

    nice collection of machines, I only collect pins personally

    have BOP, DE:SW, GoldenEye, ToTAN, BF, SP, SWEP1, BSD, SMB

    anywho, your best bet is to re-vector the images, that I am aware of lazymame has no way to export to a file

    only way you could do it at all would be to "play" the game into an ADAT machine and then use an LD2000 system from Pangolin with LC-ADAT to recapture the laser information... so basically, more trouble than its worth really

    but remember those scanners are probably not going to be so great so you want to keep the complexity down to a minimum
    Thanks... heh, yeah... I'm on KLOV. There seems to be a lot of overlap between the laser projector and arcade crowds. I wish I had space for more pins, but as it is now, I've just got three.

    Thanks for the info though... I figured there wouldn't be a good automated way to do it, so I'll probably just dump a bunch of sequences and manually trace them. But I gotta figure out the programs to make the .ild files first. Any recommendations on good free or cheap software to make the animations? I'm very much a n00b on this stuff, so I'm reading a lot, but a lot of pages and posts are old, so I dunno what is currently recommended.

    Thanks,
    DogP

  5. #5
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    look up lasermame. Matt Polak and Rob Mudryk did the game thing 15 years ago. Those scanners will never handle it. 6800 barely handle it.

  6. #6
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    Quote Originally Posted by kecked View Post
    look up lasermame. Matt Polak and Rob Mudryk did the game thing 15 years ago. Those scanners will never handle it. 6800 barely handle it.
    Yep... I'm familiar with LaserMAME. Like I said, I'm not looking to RUN the games on it, but I'd like to rip select scenes from the games and project them on the ceiling in my arcade for a little bit of ambience. I imagine it can't do the complex screens, but there are probably some simpler animations that are still pretty cool (even if it requires simplifying them a little bit).

    Like:

    or


    DogP

  7. #7
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    I saved some .ild frames the last time I was playing Gravitar with LaserMame. I'll see if I can find them.Click image for larger version. 

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  8. #8
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    Ah... that's really cool! So LaserMAME (or LazyMAME) has the ability to save .ild frames, or you manually converted them? There are a few animations that would be really cool to have on here... and every time I see the car driving animation that came with the projector, it reminds me of the old B/W vector game Speed Freak.

    A demo-like thing that'd be pretty cool would be to do something like the game Quantum, except it just moves the laserbeam (with tail) around with a trackball (no objects or anything). I don't know any way to control this real-time though, without redoing the whole microcontroller system.

    DogP

  9. #9
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    If you can get a set of coordinates from whatever binary format they are in now from the original game ROM, and print those out as number tables in plain ASCII text you can read them into LaserBoy (as text tables). You can do whatever you want to do with the vectors once inside of LaserBoy and then save the result as an ILDA file.

    The one thing you would want to do with the vectors is time optimize them for galvos.

    There are several different combinations of text tables that LaserBoy reads (and writes).

    You can use short int, real numbers or normalized numbers from -1.0 to +1.0. Colors can be from palette index, same order color tables, or direct RGB and represented either as individual decimal bytes or whole hexadecimal numbers. One single text file can contain any number of 2D or 3D frames, palettes and color tables written in any combination of numerical notation.

    LaserBoy also reads and writes color vectors in DXF and wave.

    James.
    Last edited by james; 08-29-2012 at 11:28.
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  10. #10
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    The game rom does not normally store most of the vectors in point by point format.
    Atari could not dump raw data and still run the game on the processors of the time. Thus Atari has a vector image done in either logic or custom chips, depending on the model. Some of these engines had neat tricks for scaling and rotation independent of the processor.

    So you need to interpret/scale what is in the rom, or just use Laser/Lazy MAME.

    Google "The Secret Life of Vector Generators" and you'll find a wealth of information.

    Remember a vector CRT needs a ramp generator, a galvo does its own mechanical integration of the signal.
    A CRT is so fast, that without a DAC ramp/integrator between points, you just get dots for the most part.

    For the OP, the 6 pots on the scanner assembly will be for image size, damping, integration servo gain or some similar combination for the galvo amps.
    The servo amps are PID loops using optical feedback of the scanner shaft position. Super Cheaper galvo amps omit useful pots such as linearity compensation etc.

    I keep a page up for educating tech folks about galvo amps, yours are a crude clone of a Cambridge Technology device.

    Skywise is kind enough to host it for me:

    http://www.skywise711.com/lasers/scanner/scanner.html

    Newer amps have a different feedback loop scheme more or less PII.

    Steve








    Steve
    Last edited by mixedgas; 08-29-2012 at 12:27.

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