The LaserBoy Thread

Thanks for providing interesting test material!

I'll convert the new stuff soon and also post it here.

For the sake of total disclosure, I'm doing all of this in Xubuntu, a very nice distribution of Linux.

When I started getting all these non-stop "upgrade to Windows 10" messages I said enough is enough!

I built a new computer with 8GB RAM, an 8 core AMD CPU, (6) 500GB hard drives in a RAID5 array and a 120MB solid state drive to boot with a nice 2GB video card that can do 4K resolution and a 65 inch curved screen 4K LCD monitor.

So now I run LaserBoy at 3200 x 2100 pixels on a HUGE screen!

I still maintain a Windows XP laptop to make sure it all still works in Windows and also so I can compile the exe for distributions.

James.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by james

I still maintain a Windows XP laptop to make sure it all still works in Windows and also so I can compile the exe for distributions.

James.

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If that's the only purpose you really should upgrade to win 10, or at least NT 6.x which would be Vista or higher. Because programs that work on XP doesn't necessarily work on newer versions, and no one uses XP anymore so it's not a good representative of your users.

That being said LaserBoy works fine in Win 10 for me :)

You should turn LaserBoy into a Windows Universal App. Don't even bother with mouse support. Add touch support. *runs*

Quote:

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Originally Posted by JohnYayas

You should turn LaserBoy into a Windows Universal App. Don't even bother with mouse support. Add touch support. *runs*

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I don't know what that is.

Anyway.....

I DL'ed DZ's last flac offering and since JohnYayas mentioned that some ILDA file readers don't like more than 1500 points per frame I did some fiddling with Audacity.

First I determined that at full 48K resolution, the predominant period of the wave was about 4247 samples. This flac file is really three sections. The first part is the best and that is what I wanted to capture to ILDA.

So, in Audacity, I chopped out the first 5 samples of the color signals. So now the wave is all time aligned. Then I normalized different chunks of it to get full color saturation. Then I down sampled it to 16KHz and exported that.

So when I opend it in LaserBoy I could set the samples per frame to 1416.

I compared this to the original at 48KHz and it looks pretty much the same.

This has not be re-optimized by LB at all. It is just what I got when I followed the procedure above.

There are some really long jumps in the latter part of this file. So be aware.

http://laserboy.org/free_art/Z5_1_16K_fmt5.zip

James.

Has anyone tried this?

Hi James, sorry it took so long to check this out. I'm impressed, the quality of the conversion to ILDA is pretty damn good. From what I can tell it does a much better job than LC-ADAT. The one bad thing I can see is the quality of the color signal, going from a 16bit resolution in the wave file to 8bit resolution in the ILDA file stands out a good bit more than I would have expected. Anyway, thanks for sharing!

New version of LaserBoy!

http://laserboy.org/code/LaserBoy_2016_02_11.zip

Someone just sent me a logo that he wanted converted to work with one of those SD card readers. When I tried to optimize it using settings that are not the default, but are more suited for the SD card readers, I noticed that LB was eating points! Actually it happened when I hit the key to optimize multiple times. So I did some testing and found a bug in the function that strips out dwell points and FIXED it.

@DZ I have no idea about LC-ADAT, but I can tell you that LB can only work with what you feed into it. A lot of prep is done in Audacity; like normalizing all the color channels to full scale, chopping 5 samples off the beginning of each of the color channels to time align them with the galvo signals and down sampling the wave to 16KHZ (if I remember correctly) thus significantly reducing the points per frame count. Then I set the wave sample offsets to all zero in LB and imported it. I imported it several times to get as close as possible to the number of samples it took to represent the primary period of the wave form. So you get about one whole abstract per frame. Trial and error.

James.

Could one of the Mac users out there please post a step by step on howto build LaserBoy from source on a Mac?

I have these threads to look at but I have no Mac to try this on. Sorry. Never have...

http://laserboy.org/forum/index.php?topic=626.0
http://laserboy.org/forum/index.php?topic=564.0
http://laserboy.org/forum/index.php?topic=555.0

Anyway, any help would be gratefully appreciated. I think this might take some questions from Mac users who are having some issues.

LaserBoy thanks you.

James. :)

A LaserBoy user in Russia just pointed out an issue with the current version of the pre-compiled Windows executable of LaserBoy.

If you import DXF files the colors are all messed up.

I figured out why and I fixed it.

When I compiled this version and the one immediately before it, I did not delete the object files. So it linked the executable using old, outdated object files.

So I just cleaned up everything and re-compiled it and now it works fine.

He also discovered a crash condition and i'm still working on that.

In short, if you use LB in Windows to convert DXF, you should get the current version again.

http://laserboy.org/code/LaserBoy_2016_03_15.zip

Hopefully soon I will be releasing a new version that fixes the crash condition.

It happens when you have one or more frames with absolutely no vertices and you try to save that with automatic minimization set to on.

For some reason, if you manually minimize the frames using option Capital K from menu h, it works fine.

James.

A new version of LaserBoy is now available that fixes all of the above mentioned issues.

http://laserboy.org/code/LaserBoy_2017_05_20.zip

Enjoy!

James.