CYGN-B

A decade has passed and I only now discovered a fascinating thread in which Laserist stated:

"Did you ever get a chance to look for a CYGN-B board or schematic? That's the digital cycloid generator that rode in the upper card cage of the Mark VI (& 600). The board itself is distinguished by several rows of 1/4 watt 1% resistors stretching top to bottom in three groups across the board… I'd really like to build an emulator of that beast…"

I have for four decades been haunted by the mystery of what this circuit actually was and how it achieved certain classes of images. For example, what I believe may have been referred to as the "bugoid" used in Lunar Sea in Starship. Another example, the walking clothes pin used in at least one early version of Walking On the Moon.

I didn't know until now that the "digital oscilator" ("b-mods"?) circuit was actually called CYGN-B.

Laserist, if you read this, your comments about the Johnson counter and the 555s syncing through the PS are the most interesting things I have ever read.

I have programmed an emulator that achieves, as far as I know, everything the original console was able to do, and more. If you happen to be interested, perhaps we could exchange details of the old for the new.

Actually I bought one of the original CYGN-B's from Jon back then. I think I sent it back with all the other hardware when I closed down Laserium here in St. Louis in 2014. And yes both of the images you mentioned were done with the CYGN-B. Those images involved an AM/FM image with the symmetry kicked over so only one axis was present and the other axis coming from the osc that was feeding the AM/FM signal. I've got a plan in mind for a CYGN-C that will do all that the -B did and a bunch more, but I haven't begun to prototype it. BTW it was -B because there was already a CYGN board in the system. The -B was part of the original Laserock mods which were the 6A mods - at some point they started referring to the system as a 6B, but we were up to 6F in my day. There were a lot of branches taken after my tenure, and I guess it just got too hard to keep track...

I began a software emulator ages ago that would look at digitized version of the old 351 data channel and generate frames to convert to video, but never took it too far.

The CYGN-C design involves dual buffered DACs, a microcontroller, and just enough glue to make it do tricks.

If there's anything I can do to help anybody move from offline to real time choreography I'm up for that...

Brian

Attachment 55925
This is an example of a frame from the software emulator...

I've attached two images. One is a photo of the panel that I have labeled with the control functions, as I remember them.

Second image is annotated output from my emulator showing how I get the bugoid and the clothes peg.

I have wondered much which oscillator's frequency provided the am and fm inputs to each oscillator. Do you remember how this worked? In the emulator output image I have included a chart indicating the patch I have found that makes possible both classes of images (bugoid and clothes peg) without having to be changed. How would that chart look in the original circuit?

Please pardon my ignorance, but is Jon a person I might contact and inquire to about the existence of an example of a CYGN-B? I know he was a party you spoke with in the thread from years ago. My holy grail would be to be able to schedule some tests on a functioning unit and an oscilloscope. I could make a fair offer if one could be found for $.

Mistake on the panel label image. Blue button is osc3 polarity.

The AM gain was the top knob, FM the lower knob. Osc 1 provided the AM/FM signal for osc 2, osc 2 provided AM/FM for osc 3, and osc 3 provided the AM/FM signal for osc 1. In no case was the AM/FM signal sinusoidal. Osc 2's triangle output was one source, Osc 1 & 2 were unipolar & bipolar square wave with a 50% duty cycle from the appropriate pin on the respective johnson counter. Both were buffered with an op-amp as I recall.

Jon is who Ivan turned over the company when he retired.

Jon is dsli_jon on photonlexicon. It wouldn't surprise me if he still had a board or two somewhere. I think I've got some of the old chips/transistors that went out of production over the years left from trying to cover all of the bases when I restored the 6b for the 40th anniversary in 2013. If worst comes to worst the documentation for pretty much everything was scanned and archived by Ron H. And the earliest boards were wire wrapped - geek artwork.

WOW, for four fifths of my life I have had empty fields in my brain awaiting this information on the modulation signals. I finally know! Thank you thank you thank you! It makes sense, the square wave would explain certain images I remember, but that don't seem to exist in the patches I have used with my emulator.

Again, please pardon my knowledge gap, but what does 351 refer to? I have two of the 4 track 1/4" reels, one from LaserockII and the other is probably Laserium '79. They do indeed have stereo audio, a guard track, and data on one track. It has been frustrating trying to find a studio that has a 4 track TEAC machine that actually works. Your idea for software that would look at digitized 351 data and decode the frames is interesting, I have thought about that as well. I've been told that the data is a spreadsheet of 32 bytes printed 30 times a second.

Regarding your CYGN-C design, have you considered BELA Low Latency as a platform?

351 or later 352 (same thing really, but one card instead of three.) was the name of laserium's data track. It was in a large way what separated Laserium from everybody else. Charlie McDaniel (Ivan's seriously techy partner who built that first actual projector) once told me the smartest thing they ever did was decide to emulate rather that record imagery. The 351 track contained rygb gain, master xy gain, spiral in, out, sweep, Danube rate, offset gain, and offset rate as 8 bit analog values with huge filters to smooth things out, as well as 32 bits (later 48) of housekeeping stuff. Think of it as the score as in an interpretive dance piece. It allowed someone in the studio to do the repetitive stuff while the Laserist did the "lead guitar". It was a brilliant approach... and nobody ever figured it out.

FWIW, I have not only the schematics, etc., but also an actual card (see attached scan below). dsli_jon no longer owns the assets of Laserium, they were sold to Tim Zeigenbein of Lumalaser. They have the intention of bringing back Laserium at some point in the future.

I'm not sure what the state of the Laserium intellectual property is, so I'm hesitant to release the schematic. I doubt that ANYONE would do a console like ours at Laserium. Nowadays, it's done with far more flexible CPU's, GPU's, DSP's and ASIC's. See the Radiator Kickstarter project for an excellent example (I've ordered one!) Another good example is Aldebaran Systems's Z5Plus console.

It would be a fairly large challenge to make the board I have work as you would need to wire many many pots, switches and power supplies to it to get it to work.

Brian, I'd love to see your software emulator. I tried to build a cycloid generator with Processing, but it doesn't really have the speed necessary.

Greg, if you are interested in Laserium photos, etc. let me know. I'm the self-assigned archivist (no one else volunteered to do all that digitizing!). We have almost 1100 images from shows, 300 videos and more.

Ron

Thank you for the reply Ron. (insert appropriate word of superlative gleeful stupefaction here) Great photo! I thought I'd never see that. Any chance of seeing the other side?

I understand about the schematics, but I'm glad to know they exist. Thank you for your preservation efforts.

I certainly am interested in Laserium photos, especially examples of imagery generated using this board, and / or shows < 1983 but especially anything to do with Starship or LaserockII.

If anyone is interested in an emulator of the CYGN-B that one can operate in real time by turning knobs (on the screen) and record into .ild files, I have one. It is an image synthesizer building platform called cyc on which a patch of the CYGN-B along with 3D transforms and a bunch of LFOs has been built.

That board looks like it is missing a 555.

I hadn't hadn't considered BELA, but I did just glance at the web site. I'm more of a bare metal kind of guy, and take some comfort from Silabs' multi hundred page hardware manuals. I'm using one of their 8 bit processors in a Lumia projector I've been playing with, and it'll be plenty for the CYGN-C. I'm considering one of their 32 bit beasts for something a little more complex.

351 decoded 20 bytes 40 times a second. It was comprised of three different wavelength square wave pulses the root frequency was (I think...) 13440hz. A zero bit was one positive and one negative pulse (or negative and positive depending on the ending state of the previous bit) at the root freq. A one was one pulse at root/2 and either positive or negative depending on the ending state of the of the previous bit. The frame of 120 bits started and ended with two positive/negative pulses (or neg/pos...) At root/4.

It's my understanding that Lumalaser bought the trademark name and a lot of hardware, but non-exclusive rights to the IP.

Ron, the software emulator I mentioned started back in the late 80's and first ran on a 386 without a coprocessor. It was never intended to be a real time thing. I left it running while I went on vacation and came back for one 4k x 4k rgb image. (The code was anything but highly optimized) I stumbled across the code a while back and it still compiled - it did the same image in about 3 seconds on a more modern computer. I dusted it off and had some thoughts about rendering actual Laserium style shows for Fulldome, or video as a way of communicating what Laserium was about, but never took it to that point.

That's invaluable information about the 351. The housekeeping would have been about solenoids and actuators I guess.

Laser Images patented their projector way back when, so a pretty good idea of how it worked is available. The solenoids in the optical head were controller by 5 bits through a diode logic board, you could have 32 possibilities of zero to N solenoids active. (It was primative, but field programmable with a soldering iron) The other bits controlled beam kills, selecting the inputs to the two image busses, selecting the bus connected to each scan pair, fixed rotation enables, variable rotation enables, spiral reset, diamond spiral enable, triangle audio mod, offset enables, offset selects, and obviously a couple of others I don't remember off hand...

Greg,

I don't think I'm giving away anything highly proprietary by posting the 352 data format below. We used to have a "bit box" that could generate static 352 data frames for show setup and debugging. I may have one somewhere in my Laserium boxes in the basement somewhere... It was a real pain to use since you had to set ALL the bits manually in each byte! But better than nothing.

Ron

Ron, re: "I doubt that ANYONE would do a console like ours at Laserium. Nowadays, it's done with far more flexible CPU's, GPU's, DSP's and ASIC's."

What you say is true, but the same statement could have applied to guitars, pianos, etc. if their development had been stepped on as quickly by modern technology. The advantage of a console is the laserists can develop muscle memory and even an individual style that they bring to each performance - even to live music. I'm not against using computers/etc., but when the designer/programmer of the higher tech systems limit my ability to interact to a time line rather than real time - I'm not up for that...

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Originally Posted by Greg

Thank you for the reply Ron. (insert appropriate word of superlative gleeful stupefaction here) Great photo! I thought I'd never see that. Any chance of seeing the other side?

I understand about the schematics, but I'm glad to know they exist. Thank you for your preservation efforts.

I certainly am interested in Laserium photos, especially examples of imagery generated using this board, and / or shows < 1983 but especially anything to do with Starship or LaserockII.

If anyone is interested in an emulator of the CYGN-B that one can operate in real time by turning knobs (on the screen) and record into .ild files, I have one. It is an image synthesizer building platform called cyc on which a patch of the CYGN-B along with 3D transforms and a bunch of LFOs has been built.

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Greg,

Unfortunately you are interested in very early shows where there was very little documentation. I have enclosed below the Laserock II program (which also includes Laserium Starship). Beyond that, I find nothing. Not even our performance notes. Just too early in our history.

Yes, I would be very interested in seeing and playing with your emulator of the cycloid generator. How do I go about doing that?

Ron

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Originally Posted by laserist

Ron, re: "I doubt that ANYONE would do a console like ours at Laserium. Nowadays, it's done with far more flexible CPU's, GPU's, DSP's and ASIC's."

What you say is true, but the same statement could have applied to guitars, pianos, etc. if their development had been stepped on as quickly by modern technology. The advantage of a console is the laserists can develop muscle memory and even an individual style that they bring to each performance - even to live music. I'm not against using computers/etc., but when the designer/programmer of the higher tech systems limit my ability to interact to a time line rather than real time - I'm not up for that...

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Brian,

I'm not saying that people wouldn't do a CONSOLE (look at Radiator and Z5Plus), I'm just saying that doing it in the WAY we did it with all that analog stuff is probably harder (and less adaptable) than using digital electronics. I'm in complete agreement with you about the utility, individuality, and show progression one gets with a manual console (backed with an over-ridable digital control track). To this day I have yet to see a show with the subtle complexity and breadth of Laserium's productions - not to mention the thought that was put into properly PACING the show so you didn't leave feeling like you had been hit in the face with a brick for an hour! Much of this, I believe, derives from the fact that we had a real live Laserist behind that physical console. Today's crop of timeline-based software, while very capable, does not reproduce what Laserium did.

Ron

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Originally Posted by ronhip

Greg,

I don't think I'm giving away anything highly proprietary by posting the 352 data format below. We used to have a "bit box" that could generate static 352 data frames for show setup and debugging. I may have one somewhere in my Laserium boxes in the basement somewhere... It was a real pain to use since you had to set ALL the bits manually in each byte! But better than nothing.

Ron

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Is the bit box you speak of the "midiana" board? recently got one working from the data track off a laserium tape.

Laserist: In Ron's photo I see the johnson counter for each channel is one MM74C164 8-Bit Parallel-Out Serial Shift Register and two MM74C175 Quad D-Type Flip-Flops. This makes sense for a 32 step counter. Any comment regarding the use of two Quad D-Type Flip-Flops instead of one more 8-Bit Parallel-Out Serial Shift Register? Anything to do with extracting a quadrature signal?

Ron: Thanks for another super interesting release (The data format). More on that later. I have one of those iconic handout programs, but yours is in better condition.

Ok, glad someone's interested in my abstracts generator. I'll post a couple of screen shots here, and try to get a youtube video up this week about how to use it. Then I can send it. Do you have a JDK installed that you can put the file cyc.java in and compile from the command line with javac cyc.java?

Meanwhile, if interested, I have a few re-created (using this software) numbers from Starship, which can be found by searching for pinkicecreamland on youtube. Obviously I didn't have the spinning diffraction grating wheels for the beginning of Lunar Sea so that part is more impression than reproduction.

I have 18 of the earlier shows - a few on ADAT the rest on Maxell 1/4 inch tape. Unfortunately most of the early shows were recorded on Scotch and developed a terminal case of squeeky shed syndrome. I don't have Starship or Laserock II, but I did perform them back in the day...

I do remember seeing the bit box back in the early '80s. Looked a bit like those corded TV channel changers that were around at the time.

The 74c175 inverted Q outputs were used with the shift register outputs to generate the cosine output.

The whole design is really impressive, and crammed into that form factor too..

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Originally Posted by polishedball

Is the bit box you speak of the "midiana" board? recently got one working from the data track off a laserium tape.

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No, the MIDIANA board was a later innovation for our "CS" projectors that was used to control analog things (motors and solenoids) from MIDI data. Rather than the 4 faders we had originally, we added a Peavey MIDI controller that gave us banks of 16 faders and buttons to control a variety of hardware. Excuse my vagueness - it's been almost 2 decades since I used that hardware!

Ron

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Originally Posted by laserist

I have 18 of the earlier shows - a few on ADAT the rest on Maxell 1/4 inch tape. Unfortunately most of the early shows were recorded on Scotch and developed a terminal case of squeeky shed syndrome. I don't have Starship or Laserock II, but I did perform them back in the day...

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I have the audio tracks, but not the 352 data, on CD's and on the computer, for all but a couple Laserium shows. I think I'm missing L.A.ser Olympiad and Laserium '79 if you have those soundtracks.

I believe that Lumalaser has digitized all the tapes available to them (I've sent them a few) including the 352 data and the CSX XYRGB tracks where available. I don't know if they are willing to share. Tim has said that the files are ginormous. I still have a fair collection of ADAT tapes and BetaMax tapes. I gave Jon all my 1/4" tapes, so I assume that Lumalaser has them now.

Ron

Greg, most often the shows on 1/4 inch tape were recorded with a dbx set at 1.3 - I've got a 1/4 inch 4 channel deck & dbx from my 40th anniversary experiment - so I can digitize your tape(s) if you still need it...

Ron, I've got an 8 (VHS) and 24 (HD) channel ADAT if you want to digitize anything. The files aren't all that big considering how many shows would fit on a terabyte drive.

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Originally Posted by laserist

Ron, I've got an 8 (VHS) and 24 (HD) channel ADAT if you want to digitize anything. The files aren't all that big considering how many shows would fit on a terabyte drive.

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Yep the only issue is size limit of the standard, if you decide to make 16track WAV's the CS pair tapes . But doing them individual heads is not a problem.

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Originally Posted by polishedball

Yep the only issue is size limit of the standard, if you decide to make 16track WAV's the CS pair tapes . But doing them individual heads is not a problem.

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Any idea if Lumalaser will sell individual tracks or who to contact? I have not the Love Cats track in my collection and my girls would love it as they are hung up on cats.

Laserist: Yes, is is probably best I send you the tapes. You, if anyone, will be able to transfer them in a way that may make extracting the data possible. Should I post an email address here and then you can email me a shipping address?

Ron: You mentioned you have the audio for most of the shows. Would that include Starship?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Greg

Laserist: Yes, is is probably best I send you the tapes. You, if anyone, will be able to transfer them in a way that may make extracting the data possible. Should I post an email address here and then you can email me a shipping address?

Ron: You mentioned you have the audio for most of the shows. Would that include Starship?

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Greg,

Yes, I have them all. PM me your email address and I'll send you a link to pick it up.

Ron

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Originally Posted by polishedball

Any idea if Lumalaser will sell individual tracks or who to contact? I have not the Love Cats track in my collection and my girls would love it as they are hung up on cats.

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I can't speak for Lumalaser, but you could contact Tim Zeigenbein (tim@lumalaser.com).

If you PM me your email, I'll send you a link to Love Cats from our soundtrack (or you could get Love Cats, by The Cure, from your favorite streaming service.)

Ron

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Originally Posted by ronhip

I can't speak for Lumalaser, but you could contact Tim Zeigenbein (tim@lumalaser.com).

If you PM me your email, I'll send you a link to Love Cats from our soundtrack (or you could get Love Cats, by The Cure, from your favorite streaming service.)

Ron

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Thanks for the info, i do already have the audio track.

Here are screen captures of the CYGN-B emulator.

That is really cool.

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Originally Posted by Greg

Here are screen captures of the CYGN-B emulator.

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Greg, I'm in favor of a constitutional amendment requiring that people prove they're interesting before they introduce themselves. Since you've soared over that hurdle, who are you?

Hahaha, agreed. Pleased and honored to meet you Brian. You asked who I am, but who I was perhaps is more relevant. In 1981 I was an 11 year old who knew every fact about lasers I had been able to collect, and perhaps more importantly, was very good at touching only exactly what I was told I could touch, even when unsupervised, and not breaking anything.

These reasons contributed to my striking a friendship with a young laserist performing at the McLaughlin at the time. I was allowed to hang around between shows on weekends for about a year, and eventually was allowed to explore certain parts of the console including the A and D oscillator banks. When I brought a cassette player in and performed a descent version of Odyssey without the data, I was allowed to learn some of the numbers with the data. Rocky Mountain Way was one of my favorites to perform. (I have a version of this I could post with most of the original choreography.)

It all ended (but my friendship with the laserist, with whom I'm still in contact) when Laserium closed in that city, and AVI took over. Their shows were awful compared to what I had been used to. No clever abstracts, no lumia, and no subtlety.

The one thing I found disconcerting was my inability to understand how the digital oscillators actually worked. I could dial in the presets, but when I began a systematic exploration of their functionality by reducing all gains to zero, I was disturbed by the fact that increasing the AM gain brought up a blocky looking cycloid that was somehow related to a different oscillator. There was clearly something complex and interesting going on here.

Making the rest of the story as short as possible, I began programming cyc (the CYGN-B emulator) in the mid 1990's specifically as a way to probe and re-discover the enigmatic functionality of am/fm cycloids.

I worked in tech and IT for quite a while, but these days I have letters after my name, and work as a teacher in licensed early learning programs (also known as childcare.) It's loads of fun constantly performing music, puppets, stories, science demos, and occasionally my laser show which I call Laserock Starship. I'll confess to the appearance of a tear when some 6 year olds got up and danced like the flying fans during a performance of Odyssey.

It's a pleasure to meet you Greg. We might have met way back when, I vaguely remember going to Toronto to do something field service related, but for the life of me I don't remember what...

I have a busy week ahead, but I expect to get the tapes shipped to you this Saturday.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by polishedball

Any idea if Lumalaser will sell individual tracks or who to contact? I have not the Love Cats track in my collection and my girls would love it as they are hung up on cats.

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Polishedball,

Maybe I misinterpreted your request. Though I don't have the data track, I do have a video. I played around a bit with ffmpeg to up the saturation, but it's still fairly low quality SD video. HD didn't exist yet. Oh well, it's documentation of some sort.

Pick up the video here (I couldn't get it to attach to the forum...):

http://hipschman.myqnapcloud.com:808...i?ssid=0a1D6Iu

Ron

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Originally Posted by ronhip

Polishedball,

Maybe I misinterpreted your request. Though I don't have the data track, I do have a video. I played around a bit with ffmpeg to up the saturation, but it's still fairly low quality SD video. HD didn't exist yet. Oh well, it's documentation of some sort.

Pick up the video here (I couldn't get it to attach to the forum...):

http://hipschman.myqnapcloud.com:808...i?ssid=0a1D6Iu

Ron

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Greg, PM me with an email that can take attachments. I will not post this one publicly. I believe you have to learn enough about how consoles work and have some proof of musicality before you should have one, but I was a 14-15 year old Laserium groupie once too... This is similar enough when you see it, although not a CY whatever... Before anyone gripes about this statement remember I have feely given much to this artform.


Steve

Thank you Steve.

Anyone know or guess anything about this oddity? I was told by the seller about 15 years ago that it at one time had been the console used at "Magic Mountain". It is functional to some degree. There are X and Y outputs, a couple of analog oscillators that can be switched to presets, a joystick positioner, master gain, and what looks like a third analog oscillator that at some point was re-wired to output a signal for color mod.

The most curious feature is an image rotator that is controlled by some kind of jog control. There is some noise when this control is operated, but it does in fact perform image rotation.

The jog control is a sin/cosine potentiometer. You should be able to eliminate a lot of noise by buffering the outputs with a couple of opamps configured as voltage followers.

The oscillators are likely simple op-amp based quadrature oscillators. The dead one is most likely a broken wire or a blown opamp.