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

[czyzczyz]

So one can use LSX with LaserBoy via the EzAudDac driver?

LSX Basic would probably be phase 4 in my scheme. It looks to be very powerful.

[james]

LaserBoy was designed to be like a surgeon's scalpel. You can get down the the individual vertices and literally touch them with your fingers.

It lets you do all kinds of manipulations to frames and frame sets that no other application can do.

It's all about perfect numeric precision.

Yes. The interface is a bit weird. That's the whole point!

Once you learn it, you are very connected to your art and you will know a whole lot more about laser vector art in general to apply to all other laser apps.

ILDA is supposed to be the generic file format for transferring color vector art from one laser app to another and LB tries to make the most of that.

James.

[mixedgas]

Let me translate a bit. James can't stand the industry standard term of "points" so he went with his own idea of "Vertices".
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A point is a discrete location where a galvo is commanded to move to by the software, or a single location stored in a frame.
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Despite the term being used by the founders of the laser show industry, he uses "vertices"
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I'd still advise skipping steps 1 to 3 and go straight to step four, software wise. You'll be much happier, and in the end, save money. This hobby/industry is very money intensive, and you pretty much get only what value you pay for. If you feel like trading off huge amounts of time, then work with wavs, and have to use a separate wav editor to edit your show, and another software wav player to play it back, unless you export to an SD card. So why use three separate pieces of software?
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If you use Laserboy, you will generally have three or four extra time consuming manual steps every time you edit an event in your show. Why? Because you are always working with RAW data. That has its place some times, but the method is very, very, very, time consuming.
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With Laserboy, you'll need to jump to something like Spiderplayer every time you "compile" your show. Laserboy is for all practical purposes an analog of a software compiler with a graphical interface using letter keys. Laserboy itself does not drive the DAC, nor sync to the music. Its a computing engine that does an array of specialized tasks in a labor intensive way.
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Have you added mouse support to the drawing window yet James? The cost of laser show software has taken a nose dive since "back in the day" when Laserboy was a real alternative for low end users to create frames.
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Steve

[colouredmirrorball]

For LaserBoy I'd be buying a USB sound device, and then doing a whole bunch of soldering and hooking things together and configuring. $20 for the sound card, $40 + shipping for the Laserboy kit, and then my time to put it together. I love that it's open-source and that it might be possible to run it from a Raspberry Pi2 in the projector. I'm a little worried that I might mess up the assembly process and have a difficult time figuring out my errors since I don't have an oscilloscope handy.

It is worth stressing that Laserboy does NOT stream to a sound card DAC. It merely produces .wav files that can be played on a sound card with another program. This means, you can't put it on a Pi and let it control the laser. No real time effects, no playback speed adjustment, no audio inputs, beat sync etc. That is, I think, why the Laserboy + sound card approach isn't very popular. You could just as well get a DMX laser with SD card and have the same effects. You'd even get the DMX controls which are lacking in audio programs. Most people want the real time input based effects so just go with QS or LSX or whatever is available.

Let me translate a bit. James can't stand the industry standard term of "points" so he went with his own idea of "Vertices".
.
A point is discrete location where a galvo is commanded to move to by the software, or a single location stored in a frame.
.
Despite the term being used by the founders of the laser show industry., he uses vertices
.
I'd still advise skipping steps 1 to 3 and go straight to step four, software wise. You'll be much happier, and in the end, save money. This hobby/industry is very money intensive, and you pretty much get only what value you pay for.


Steve

That's just terminology. Most 3D software talk about vertices. You use what you're used to. When I talked to James he would say something about a "vector" which I thought to be a vertex or point. After much confusion I realised a vector would be something called an Array in the languages I'm used to...

[james]

Let me translate that BS.

Steve knows NOTHING about LaserBoy.

Laser art is VECTOR art. A vector is the line that exists between two consecutive vertices. That is the only thing you can see in laser vector art.

The time quantum that makes laser art temporal is the measure of time BETWEEN vertices.

Individual points are meaningless unless they are examined within the context of a vector art image; a series of at least two consecutive vertices.

That's the POINT I always try to make.

I don't even know what Steve means by RAW data.

LB allows you to save minimal vector art OR fully optimized art.

It's all a matter of knowing what you are dealing with and what you need.

PS. The word vector has at least two meanings. One is in the sense that I just described; the line between two consecutive vertices.

Another is from the C++ Standard Template Library. a <vector> is a template class that lets you create dynamic arrays of elements of the same class type.

LB uses the C++ STL <vector> template class quite a bit in its internals.

James.

[mixedgas]

Steve was in the room during much of the time Laserboy was in planning. Steve was in the room helping James get his first SCD working. Remember the 1 KHz circle James, on a vectorscope?
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Steve knows plenty of how Laserboy works. In fact, many of its functions were my specific requests. Including coloring a frame by picking up colors of a bitmap.
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There are third party tools made by Zoof a long time ago that would let you enjoy a SCD, if you can download them and the driver that supports them. Other then that, save your money.
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Steve

[james]

Steve was in the room during much of the time Laserboy was in planning. Steve was in the room helping James get his first SCD working. Remember the 1 KHz circle James, on a vectorscope?
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Steve knows plenty of how Laserboy works.

Steve

No you weren't.
No you didn't.
No you don't.

You do however spend a lot of effort slamming it.

James.

[czyzczyz]

Sorry, didn't mean to spark any sort of flamewars about technology. I'm really just trying to sort out the various options for working with this cheap laser projector.

When I keep using the word Laserboy, I think I'm mostly referring to the correction amp. I know that one would have to play wav files generated by the keyboard-driven LaserBoy software into it, and that this would not be a realtime process. The thing that seemed appealing about the Raspberry Pi would be that I could drop a wav file into the Pi via sftp and then trigger its playback via command-line or a simple web interface -- and I wouldn't have to worry about drivers for the sound card on my computer.

The tinkering aspect of this hardware setup seems interesting, as it might work with openlase, and maybe openlase-mame (both of which are a form of realtime output). And I wonder if anyone's managed to get the Processing graphics library to output to such soundcard-based devices to control galvos and a laser, it seems more likely that a scrappy system like this would have been hacked into working with Processing than a more expensive DAC with a proprietary driver. There's likely lots of room for experimentation with such a setup.

LSX and the Riya or Etherdream seem like a great way to do real laser shows.

I'm a little unsure whether any of these DAC solutions (soundcard or no) can be used with this projector's hardware without first replacing the diode driver.

(edited to add note about Raspi)

[james]

Steve knows plenty of how Laserboy works. In fact, many of its functions were my specific requests. Including coloring a frame by picking up colors of a bitmap.

Steve

That is complete nonsense.

You don't even know how to spell it!

It's LaserBoy; one word, with a capital L and a capital B.

There are many things that you have expressed a need for that are in fact incorporated in the workings of LaserBoy and you refuse to learn about how to use them. You also refuse to ask me anything about how to use them.

The one thing that you are profoundly good at is taking credit for other people's work.

James.

[Laser Wizardry]

" 15 characters"