Scannermax 506s

[kecked]

Kecked,

While I dont have any air bearing polygons, I do have a nice matched pair of polygons in the basement...

Looks like its time for annual pre-Christmas lunch with you, PhatPhotons, and a certain mild mannored graduate student. I can thus deliver them, one less thing to toss out in the coming cleanup.


Which would you prefer? Staff Cafe in the Big 647 Nanometer Building or Filafel????

Steve

BRB sounds fine. Yes I would like to use the polygons. I'm trying to figure out how to get the right raster speed and then how to sync the brightness info. I figure to start with a single color. Green in fact. Very first thing I want to do is play TANK off laser mame with it but as a full raster. If I get that far I'll figure how to sync the full color set. I'm really considering just buying a microvision projector and saying done. Sometimes the work is not worth it. I already have a 1080p 110" projection.
Am I really going to get much better of an image without going 4k?

[mixedgas]

I'll bring you the polys to keep and the poor mans thermal imager to play with.

4K means resonant scanner, and I know where to get those...

Steve

[rns0504]

Hi Pieterjan,

I am currently making a new thread regarding the Saturn series of Scanners... would you mind posting this there instead to keep this (somewhat) 506 oriented? Thanks!

[masterpj]

Hi Pieterjan,

I am currently making a new thread regarding the Saturn series of Scanners... would you mind posting this there instead to keep this (somewhat) 506 oriented? Thanks!

Sure thing! I will look for this thread now!

[skot]

Hi Bolo,

Until our Mach Mini amplifier is complete, that Kvant system is certainly a good choice.

What ever happened with this amp?

[rns0504]

What ever happened with this amp?

Shelved indefinitely

Didn't make a ton of sense to continue to pursue, because our Mach DSP amplifier which we use for the Saturn series is also compatible with the C506 these days after making a few changes to the C506. Offers better performance than the Mach Mini would have been able to do, and by increasing volume of Mach DSP production we were able to get the costs pretty reasonable, when compared to having 2 separate products.

There are a handful of people on this board who have a C506 system driven with Mach DSP. But we haven't been advertising this or pushing it in the laser show market that much. We have been working quite a bit on capturing the industrial market instead. There are at least 3 self-driving car companies use Mach DSP with C506, and many universities / medical and dental device companies who are using them in their products as well.

I'd estimate that perhaps 80 to 90 percent of Saturn production and 50 percent of C506 production is used for industrial and medical purposes these days...

[loopee]

Would have been nice if this was communicated with the forum

I've been holding out buying the C506 on the promise that these amps were going top materialize, and I didn't want to go down the path of sub par amps, especially given the hype that Pangolin made around these amps and there capabilities.

I still can't get over that you guys don't sell the scanners with drivers and that it's reliant on third party drivers

[dkumpula]

Hey Loopee,

I'd suggest just reaching out to Pangolin and chatting about your needs. In my experience, the team will do their best to accommodate your requests if they have the capacity to do so. In this case, I'd put in an on-line order during the day your time (using the other category on the on-line order form here) describing what you want in as much detail as possible. Then I'd follow up with a call to Pangolin the next morning (early) your time. You are 14 hours ahead of Eastern Standard time at the moment so you should be able to catch them in the late afternoon their time. You can work out the details over the phone with Ryan, Jorge or Justin in this case. Assuming they have capacity to address your needs, of course.

Oh, on that note, unlike say Lasorbs, you should probably be aware that special requests take time to build utilizing their limited supply of folks with the appropriate skills. Even if they can accommodate your request, you may be looking at long-ish lead times. The wait is always worth it, though.

-David

[rns0504]

Hi Loopee,

Thanks for your comments and feedback.

The forum comment is interesting, because we get feedback no matter what we do! When we post on the forum a lot, we get told that this is not something that 'professional companies' do... and when we don't post anything, people comment that we are 'too corporate' and 'disconnected from the people who built the company'! Lately we err on the side of not posting at all, mostly because of how incredibly busy we are these days...

Regardless, there is usually someone in the office 24/7, so we encourage people to call us directly for the latest information. We have a lot of new projects / products we have not discussed on the forums at all. A direct email is also encouraged as well. We don't really consider the PL forum to be the 'place to go' for all the latest Pangolin news.

As for the amp, perhaps my comments were not properly understood. I'll try to explain better. Pangolin has two different amps we were developing for our scanners, the 'Mach Mini' and the 'Mach DSP'. The Mach Mini was designed to work with the Compact 506 only, and the Mach DSP was going to be exclusive to the Saturn series of scanners. There were a few reasons for this, but the prominent reasons were that we believed that the Mach Mini would be cheaper to produce than the Mach DSP. The C506 was intended to be a low-cost scanner set, so this cost savings would be important. The other prominent reason was because the position sensor technologies between the C506 and the Saturn scanners are different, and not directly compatible with each other.

We realized that the Mach Mini would not be as cheap to produce as originally thought (I believe the processor was discontinued), and the Mach DSP, which was already finished, could offer better performance with the C506 than the Mach Mini would. By producing larger volumes of Mach DSP, we are able to hit a reasonable cost, making the Mach Mini pretty redundant.

However, the issue of the position sensor still existed. We developed a new position sensor for the Compact 506 to make it work with the Mach DSP. The biggest problem using the Mach DSP creates, is that it is not compatible with any of the C506 scanners already 'in the field'. There are something like 11,000 C506 scanners around the world right now. None of these existing scanners will be compatible with the Mach DSP, without significant modification to the scanner or to the driver (or both). This is something that can only be done by Pangolin. The Mach Mini would have been compatible with all of these scanners, but as stated, it is indefinitely shelved.

As for selling scanners with drivers, we have been doing this, just not advertising publicly. As stated before, we are a bit more interested in capturing and serving the industrial market than the laser show market at this time. The final package cost of the whole system is a bit higher than we were originally hoping for (have to finance all the Mercedes cars the Pangolin employees are driving somehow... /sarcasm). It is a bit expensive compared to other scanning systems aimed at the light-show market, but it is very reasonably priced for the requirements of the industrial industry.

For the C506 with Mach DSP complete turn-key system, the cost is $995-$1095 for new customers, depending on mirror size. For the Saturn series, the cost is around $2495 for new customers. This fluctuates a bit if you need gold or silver coated mirrors, multiple tunings, long or custom cables, power supplies, etc. But that is a reasonable end-user baseline price.

As always, we are continuing to increase capacity, and hired 6 new scanner assembly people in November. However, we are still operating at capacity. We had one industrial (self driving car) client purchase 90% of our production line for Saturn scanners. And to this day, about 90% of C506 scanners are sold to clients who have developed their own amplifiers to meet their own needs and cost requirements.

Hope this helps. Please feel free to give us a call any time if you have any questions or concerns. We welcome any feedback!

[swamidog]

Hey Ryan,

Thanks for this post. I think well thought out and well written posts like this are really excellent at customer relations and engagement. Please keep this sort of outreach up.

I'm quite intrigued by the idea of 506's with a Mach DSP amp. What sort of performance characteristics would a set have with 3 and 5mm mirrors?

Thanks!

Hi Loopee,

Thanks for your comments and feedback.

The forum comment is interesting, because we get feedback no matter what we do! When we post on the forum a lot, we get told that this is not something that 'professional companies' do... and when we don't post anything, people comment that we are 'too corporate' and 'disconnected from the people who built the company'! Lately we err on the side of not posting at all, mostly because of how incredibly busy we are these days...

Regardless, there is usually someone in the office 24/7, so we encourage people to call us directly for the latest information. We have a lot of new projects / products we have not discussed on the forums at all. A direct email is also encouraged as well. We don't really consider the PL forum to be the 'place to go' for all the latest Pangolin news.

As for the amp, perhaps my comments were not properly understood. I'll try to explain better. Pangolin has two different amps we were developing for our scanners, the 'Mach Mini' and the 'Mach DSP'. The Mach Mini was designed to work with the Compact 506 only, and the Mach DSP was going to be exclusive to the Saturn series of scanners. There were a few reasons for this, but the prominent reasons were that we believed that the Mach Mini would be cheaper to produce than the Mach DSP. The C506 was intended to be a low-cost scanner set, so this cost savings would be important. The other prominent reason was because the position sensor technologies between the C506 and the Saturn scanners are different, and not directly compatible with each other.

We realized that the Mach Mini would not be as cheap to produce as originally thought (I believe the processor was discontinued), and the Mach DSP, which was already finished, could offer better performance with the C506 than the Mach Mini would. By producing larger volumes of Mach DSP, we are able to hit a reasonable cost, making the Mach Mini pretty redundant.

However, the issue of the position sensor still existed. We developed a new position sensor for the Compact 506 to make it work with the Mach DSP. The biggest problem using the Mach DSP creates, is that it is not compatible with any of the C506 scanners already 'in the field'. There are something like 11,000 C506 scanners around the world right now. None of these existing scanners will be compatible with the Mach DSP, without significant modification to the scanner or to the driver (or both). This is something that can only be done by Pangolin. The Mach Mini would have been compatible with all of these scanners, but as stated, it is indefinitely shelved.

As for selling scanners with drivers, we have been doing this, just not advertising publicly. As stated before, we are a bit more interested in capturing and serving the industrial market than the laser show market at this time. The final package cost of the whole system is a bit higher than we were originally hoping for (have to finance all the Mercedes cars the Pangolin employees are driving somehow... /sarcasm). It is a bit expensive compared to other scanning systems aimed at the light-show market, but it is very reasonably priced for the requirements of the industrial industry.

For the C506 with Mach DSP complete turn-key system, the cost is $995-$1095 for new customers, depending on mirror size. For the Saturn series, the cost is around $2495 for new customers. This fluctuates a bit if you need gold or silver coated mirrors, multiple tunings, long or custom cables, power supplies, etc. But that is a reasonable end-user baseline price.

As always, we are continuing to increase capacity, and hired 6 new scanner assembly people in November. However, we are still operating at capacity. We had one industrial (self driving car) client purchase 90% of our production line for Saturn scanners. And to this day, about 90% of C506 scanners are sold to clients who have developed their own amplifiers to meet their own needs and cost requirements.

Hope this helps. Please feel free to give us a call any time if you have any questions or concerns. We welcome any feedback!