New Build (FINALLY!!!)

After collecting bits here and there and kinda-of starting for about 5 years, I am finally getting around to knocking together my lumia projector. The whole projector will be queued via DMX; the speed of the motors, the rotary solenoids that will divert the beams to different effects, and the brightness of each laser. This is going to have four RGB sources, some with different wavelengths for variety... e.g. 445nm and 462nm, 520nm and 532nm... Even though they are running through dichros, it's only to conserve space. Each color will have it's own path. The only RGB source that will have a nearly aligned path will be feeding some torture tubes for some good color mixing seen here:
Attachment 55555


So, nothing special here. Same W.D. sample pattern glass that everyone is using with a hobnail bowl on a 3d printed turntable for the top tier.
Attachment 55556

The bottom tier will have a few torture tubes and a three-layer cut crystal effect, each crystal glass will be (optionally) rotated on different axes.
Attachment 55557

All the motors are 0.6 RPM but they'll be on a speed controller that can get them down to 0.2 RPM when needed. Those will be controlled via a DMX LED dimmer. Each motor has a fast quenching diode to counter the back EMF. Still a ton to do but the hardest part (or so I have been told) is getting started. I don't believe that but regardless, I have broken ground.

Excellent, congrats!

You can use a diamond holesaw to turn your square glass into circles.

Please keep posting.

See you at SELEM?

...Mike

Try adds liquids of different index. If you are careful you can pour a stepped gradient liquid like mgcl2

Excellent! Can’t wait to see pix!

…Mike

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Originally Posted by TheHermit

Very cool! Mine is still rolling around in my head. Any progress update?

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I can't wait to see what you come up with!! Thanks! I forgot all about this post over the years, lol! I have some pics at the bottom!

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Sweet! Didn't think about DMX for controlling lumia projectors. I've still got unused GPIO pins on the Teensy 4.1 for PWM of RGB & a 6th unused DAC channel for DC motor speed control.
I'm repurposing the RGB LDs from a pair of 3 watt el cheapo modules. Three assignable beams will be RG, GB, BR, which will be arranged 120 degrees around the lumia glass. That will produce 3 different clouds of the same type, but in 3 color ranges, while rotating in 3 different directions.
The pick-off mirrors could direct all 3 clouds towards the central scanned image or around it's perimeter. 🤩

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When I thought about all the different variables involved with my lumia, e.g. motor speeds, RGB brightness, multiple turrets; I started to realize how many controls would need to be wired up. It would require it's own console. DMX seemed like the obvious choice. I could run it manually from a DMX console and/or program DMX queues using Beyond. By queuing the lumia based on a timeline, that would free me up to "play" my abstracts that have midi assigned attributes for live manipulation. The only thing that would be canned here is the lumia and the base harmonically balanced abstracts.

Since I am running each lumia "turrent" with individual RGB modules, I don't have to worry about pickoff flags/mirrors. I love the complexity of the old-school projectors but for ease and convenience, I am just going with the RGB modules until I have the room to expand in the future.

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Didn't have 'torture tubes' back in the day. Looks like old amp tubes, but distorted with a blow torch? So... you're rotating the tube from it's base, while passing the beam through both sides, I presume?

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That is exactly what I am doing. I absolutely love torture tubes (dimple glass) for you old pros ;)! The ultra creamy, almost smoke like movement gets me every time. It is one of my favorite lumia effects.

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Actually, that crystal ball has a special memory for me. I purchased one exactly like it from a duty free shop on a ferry to Ireland. A few years later, Cliff Richards used it during his European Tour. I stuck a beam out to center stage and Cliff passed the crystal ball in front of it, like a mirror ball coming from the palm of his hand.
Funny ole world, ain't it?
😎

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When I first saw a laser hit one of my wife's Swarofski Christmas ornaments, I knew I needed something like that in my lumia. For the time being, I don't have my crystal assembly install. It isn't ready yet. Work and other projects have slowed my progress here. For now though, the lumia is in working order. I don't have many pictures of it naked but here it is with all the clothes on and a sample of one of the torture tubes with an, ever-so-slight misaligned, RGB beam passing through it.

Attachment 59143



Attachment 59145
Attachment 59144

Attachment 59146

Wow, looks great!

It has been too long since I have updated this thread. Like a lot of my projects, they are normally never finished. I work on them when I get the urge. A lot of the fun for me is the journey, not the destination. Anyway... updates!

I finally decided to strip out the old DC motor gearboxes and install the stepper motors with planetary gearboxes I had posted about a couple of years ago. The benefit is that I can get the speed of these down to 1RPH if I really wanted and they are still way smoother than the DC motors I was dealing with. The thing with DC motors is that they can only go so slow before they don't have enough force to spin, even with a PWM pulse. Best I could do on my DC motors was .2 rpm, which would probably have been fine but they started getting really jittery at that speed.

After yanking out the old motors, I need to make some new mounts for these. The tolerance between the shaft bearing and the screw holes was very tight. I decided to mill out my own mounting brackets.

After all the hype I gave to those DMX to stepper controllers that I posted about previously, I found that once I pushed myself to get a little more comfortable with Arduino coding, it was far cheaper and way more customizable to just use an Arduino. This would require an A4988 motor controller for each stepper. So far, I only have four installed. When done, I will have nine of them. Seven for effects and two for steering mirrors for effect selection. To make things simpler, I decided make a board that would house 8 of the drivers.

I finally cracked the code on engraving my own PCBs. The trick, don't use cheap boards from Amazon. The Chanzon chinese junk on Amazon is the worst. The cladding (if you could call it that) seems like it's a few atoms thick. The adhesive is also dismal. It delaminates easily. With an endmill bit, it lifted off the board and was just the worst. I finally got some high quality surplus board from Electronic Goldmine. The cladding was so thick, you could see it from the edge of the board.

That's what good PC board looks like! Moral of the story, you get what you pay for!

After milling for about 1.5 hours, it looks like shit but once it's deburred and buffed with 2500 grit sandpaper, it looks super clean.

That looks awesome, absolom! I wonder if these are the same stepper motors that Buffo was showing off at a previous SELEM. They were quite impressive, could not see the stepping at all. Glad to see some DIY still going on out there!
*DZ

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Originally Posted by DZ

That looks awesome, absolom! I wonder if these are the same stepper motors that Buffo was showing off at a previous SELEM. They were quite impressive, could not see the stepping at all. Glad to see some DIY still going on out there!
*DZ

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Thanks, David! They are most likely the same steppers. I think Adam bought a few after I reviewed them in this thread: https://www.photonlexicon.com/forums...lution-finally!

They work very well when paired with microstepping drivers. Either the A4988 or DRV8825 will work great although the DRV8825 drivers will do 1/32 microstepping which would probably be even smoother but at this point, probably unnecessary. What's good about this setup is I think I'm only sending about 100mA to each motor, they don't even get warm which is normally a usual side effect of microstepping.

It's a shame there isn't as much DIY happening. It's also a shame that the traffic here has died down so much due to facebook groups and such. I refuse to go on facebook. It is a political cesspool that is almost impossible to avoid political conversations!

Oh well, from one DYIer to another, cheers! *DZ Although, your projects are much cooler than mine!!!

You should look at the TMC2209/TMC2130 stepper drivers, pin compatible to the A4988 drivers but do up to 1/256 microstepping and are silent due to the StealthChop feature (removes the common stepper whine noise)

https://photonlexicon.com/forums/sho...911#post364911

Cheapest means I've found.

Cheers...Mike

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Originally Posted by loopee

You should look at the TMC2209/TMC2130 stepper drivers, pin compatible to the A4988 drivers but do up to 1/256 microstepping and are silent due to the StealthChop feature (removes the common stepper whine noise)

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I'll definitely check these out. These little steppers aren't too loud once the cover to my lumia projector is on. 1/256th might be a bit extreme for me but I'll still probably pick some up anyway. Stepper drivers are pretty damn inexpensive.

I finally gutted the last of the brushed DC motors and gearboxes. I printed up a new mount for the torture/dimple tube steppers. These are only a 19:1 gear reduction as they were more inexpensive than the 64:1 modules and they had the convenience of being available on Amazon. No mucking around with int'l shipping. I also found that they both perform about the same using the drivers I have. Plus, I am not going to be running these effects glacially slow. Once mounted, I did a small test to ensure everything is working correctly. The next phase is to get rid of the Ledex rotary solenoids for effect selection. They are fast but damn, they are loud! Since I have been having great luck with Arduino/stepper motors, the effect selector I'm going with is a stepper with a mirror mount that I am fabricating and a optocoupler for 0 position reference. This'll all be driven via DMX so I can manually select effects or plug the selections into a Beyond timeline. No movement on that yet but getting closer. Anyway, here are the pics, thus far.

Nice work, Brian!

The steppers that we were playing with at SELEM were indeed the same ones you originally posted. They have a 60-1 planetary gearbox on the output shaft. I've seen that same design with a 100-1 gearbox, but I think that would be too slow.

I had issues with the A4988 stepper driver you posted, so I switched to the TB6600 units ($25 for 4 of them from Amazon). They work great. Pretty sure Mike Gould used these for some of his projects as well.

I was able to slow those steppers down to a virtual crawl with only 1/8th stepping, but I could also speed them up so fast that the Lumia looked like flames on the wall. Very cool stuff.

I used this Pulse-Width Modulation generator to control the stepper driver. $12 each on Amazon if you buy 2.

Adam

Good job! Steppers rool.

HOLY this thread is amazing! I did not even think to use half this stuff for laser effects. Now off to thrift stores with the laser pointer and another project to build.