need help planning my projector

[jkaiser3000]

Ok, I guess I'd better use the resistors, just in case . And, I'll be using pins 3 and 16 for blanking, for the time being, as I only have a green laser. That way I can play RGB frames and still have a recognizable projection.

Thanks everyone for your answers. I think I'll try to make everything work tomorrow, if I have time

[yaddatrance]

I just eyeballed the Easylase design... for reference...

If you are using Easylase w/ DT40s, you will want to connect the - signal input on the scanamp to pin 25 (GND) and connect the + signal input to pins 1 & 2 for X & Y respectively. Do not connect pins 14 & 15 to the scanamp. You will want to tie two medium value resistors from pin 14 & 15 on the ILDA connector to ground (pin 25). This is because the way they have designed their output opamps to support differential signals behaves poorly with floating output signal lines. This is not necessarily a "flaw", but put in a positive light as a "cost-saving optimization" chosen to minimize the number of components their board needs.

[jkaiser3000]

What if I only use a green laser?, will I need to tie the other output connections as well? I'll be using pins 3/16 (intensity) for the blanking, but the other blanking pins will be unused. I think I remember the easylase manual stated not to have any outputs unconnected. I just want to make sure I don't fry my board

[yaddatrance]

Their notes strongly recommend connecting all unused (-) output lines to ground (pin 25)... That said, I would actually suspect that leaving the unused color lines alone would be safe as I don't see enough opamps for them to have implemented any sort of real creepy differential circuit which requires balanced impedance loads on the color channels as well as supporting differential X & Y. The only real problem could be power consumption issues or backEMF if your projector has "real" stuff hooked to the alternate pins.

So in a single laser configuration, you'd

tie the (+) line of the laser to pin 3,
tie the (-) line of the laser (as well as pin 16) to pin 25.

To follow their directions implictly with your setup.

Scanner X (+) to pin 1
Scanner X (-) to pin 25
Scanner Y (+) to pin 2
Scanner Y (-) to pin 25
4.7k resistor between pin 14 and pin 25
4.7k resistor between pin 15 and pin 25
Laser (+) to pin 3
Laser (-) to pin 25
pins 25, 16, 18, 19 & 20 all tied together.

I would most certainly diverge from their recommendation on one thing, I would not tie pin 25 directly to cable shield, I would use a 500k or 1M resistor between pin 25 and the shield to protect against noise.

Lastly, I would set the Blank/Intensity jumper to match the laser you have (TTL/analog)

[jkaiser3000]

Thanks for your help guys, I really appreciate it.

I finally connected everything together and now I have another set of questions (sorry, seems it'll never end).

Ok, here it goes. I turned mamba on and loaded the ilda test pattern, but nothing happened. I mean, the galvos never blinked. Everything was hooked up and connected to their respective power supplies. After some tinkering with mamba's options, I found out that the board is not configured as there are no options for it on mamba's output options. I remember installing the board according to the instructions, and the green led is on. I tried uninstalling the board's drivers with a utility that came in the cd, but is gave an error message as well.

Do you have any idea what's going on? I'm eager to see this thing working

[JimBo]

I know the medialas usb box freezes quite regularly with my mamba black.
To sort it out I go to start/controlpanel/system/device manager, delete com port 4 (the one that mamba black creates), unplug the usb box and power, restart mamba black, plug the box back in and power it up.
Mamba Black then reloads the com port and it works fine.
Maybe you can try that.

Jim

[jkaiser3000]

I was playing with this thing a little, and it turns out I need to connect the board before I can runt the program, otherwise the program won't recognize the board. Weird.

Anyway, even when everything was up and running, the galvos still did nothing. No moving, no flickering, nothing. I thinks there's a problem either with the easylase or somewhere with the galvos. Or maybe mamba is not sending the output?.

Geez, this thing is playing tricks on me :roll: . Every time I think I have everything solved, something else creeps up :roll: .

I'll keep playing and see what I can find.

c'ya

[JimBo]

Does the easylase have a LED that lets you know that it is recieving data?
The MediaLas USB has a blue LED that lights when it is getting data.

Jim

[jkaiser3000]

well, now that you mention it, yes, it does have one, but it doesn't light up. Guess that means the problem lies between mamba and easylase. I've tried it on two different computers, and the same happens on each one, so I don't think the usb ports or computer is at fault here

Edit: I just retested everything, and it turns out that led does light up, just very dimly. At first I didn't notice it :roll: . I tried using other channels but the led went out then. I don't know whether the channels are for dmx though

[jkaiser3000]

I figured out what the problem was. It turns out it was neither hardware nor software, but operator induced ops: . I really need to slow down and think things first. I was only loading the frames into the frame list, but not loading them into the scene, so mamba wasn't outputing anything since there was nothing to output. How dumb can I get?.

Anyway, now the scanners are moving, at least, but not adequately, I think. The top scanner is barely moving at all while the bottom one is scanning well. Or maybe it's the other way around?, the bottom one is moving too much while the top one is ok?. If someone has the manual for these galvos, could you send them to me via email?, it's jkaiser3000 at gmail. Looks like I will need to tune these babies. Or do you think there's something else going on?

Thanks really for all your help