Hi all!
I was able to get my first laser scanner running today.
It uses a correction amp on a breadboard connected to a Best Connectivity SD-AUD20040 USB sound card which uses the Cmedia CM6206. They are connected to a SpaceLas PT-30K scanner unit.
I have been using LFI software to display a few .ild ILDA files that I have been able to grab from various links I've come across on this site.
At first I had some issues with wobbly output, but through trial and error adjusting various settings bars in LFI, I have so far been able to get surprisingly good looking, stable, and sharp images. I find that even on the "good" image files I have to change the points-per-second setting in order to find a value that cancels out what I like to refer to as "wobbling" - sub-sections of the image wobble up and down periodically and slowly, making the image unbalanced most of the time.
But, there are several ILDA test files which have many circles and letters and things like that, and I get a pretty messed up image from the projector. It seems to want to move diagonally to another location when it is blanking (or something like that)... I will take a picture and post it up in an edit. I am wondering what sort of things I can do to figure out what's going on with these?
Another issue I am trying to figure out is what values to tune the amplifier for. My scanner takes 6 input lines, +X, -X, GND, +Y, -Y, GND, yet my soundcard dac produces a single signal line. I have tried connecting 0V to -X and signal (with gain set to 6.5V at max) to +X and it seems to work but I want to know how I am supposed to set it up so as to get maximum scan angle.
I am also unsure about what this scanner is supposed to accept in terms of voltages. On
this site I saw that +X and -X (and the Y's) are differential signals that don't seem to exceed a magnitude of 5V each. But the DAC amplifier doesn't produce anything like this. Is it safe for me to swing to +10V?
Any advice or help not directly related to my questions would also be helpful!
Thanks.