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Thread: Open Laser Show DAC (USB)

  1. #21
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    Apr 2013
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    Whoops checked out the downloads...

  2. #22
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    Feb 2009
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    East Coast of Southern Virginia
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    The Romeo board is more of a robot controller... The motor driver could technically drive a pair of galvos without amps... however it would not be ideal. You could probably use them effectively for patterns and beam effects when used with galvos that have torsion bars (like general scanning G124s, GM20s, G100s, G120s). Feed the motor driver (2 channel H-Bridge) with PWM. That would be neat probably. You could use steppers but not in the way I think you are thinking. You basically constrain the shaft with a torsion spring... like a zip tie glued to the mirror holder. Then drive them on one coil with a variable voltage.

    I do not have any V4 boards. I only made 2 of them as prototypes and they were relatively expensive. They work nicely but are hard to put together by hand because of the resistor nets. (maybe I should just go ahead and order up a batch of them... :/

    I do have some V3 boards left. I will send you one for free. Two for $5... (1st one free 2nd one $5). Postage is free. PM me if you are interested.

    I am currently redesigning the board and will have those available in the summer time.

  3. #23
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    Apr 2013
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    Hi cfavreau,

    [FONT=Arial][SIZE=2]I would be interested in obtaining v3 to play with and learn from. I will need your information to send you payment and the address to ship to.
    And will be interested in checking out your redesign when its available.
    I'm going to look more in depth on what your talking about with the step motors....


    Good thing there are others who spend countless hours on areas of research that have the ability to make everything work. And share this knowledge with others interested in the same field of research and exploration.

    Thanks!


    Kristall

  4. #24
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    Oct 2007
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    Wisconsin
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    Quote Originally Posted by Kristall View Post
    Hi I saw your post @ Photonlexicon I am currently trying to build a USB DAC / audio correction AMP with a Laserboy correction AMP build and a Cmedia external sound card.

    I had originally fell in rapture with the idea of using a Arduino. Which you have evolved and have been working on. Originally I was going to try another individual's Arduino design but it was only for 2 lasers. And by all means not easy for me to grasp at the time. Due to the lack of appropiate information. But now I have more skills and have started to venture into the world of Arduino for environmental monitoring and control.
    So for now I am in a current build with the correction AMP/SC USB interface. I am tinkering with HE laser software for now.
    Does your design do away with the external sound card? I would like to try and build your design for two additional scanners. Another thing I saw is someone controlling stepper motors with a Romeo V2 with faster response and a higher torque rate I believe?
    Would it be feasible to use these as drive cards for galvos? What sorts of voltage signals would come off the OLSD to the galvos?

    Otherwise can I please buy 2 OLSD V4 Shield boards from you? It would really
    make my next build interesting and help me along to develop my skills.

    Kristall
    Hello Kristall, Welcome to the forum!

    Would you please tell who's other arduino design you have looked at or a link to it please?
    I am also working on putting together this OLS V3 board, Cfavreau was kind enough to send me an empty board, Thanks~!

    Kristall I assume by now you have figured this out but the answer is Yes, this board does away with the need of a Sound Card DAC.

    You should update your profile with location information, people, curious people just wanna know

  5. #25
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    May 2013
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    Fort Mill, SC
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    Greetings,

    My name is Jason I am a new member to this forum. I am working on constructing a laser projector and had already decided to use an Arduino when I came across the OLSD. It was reassuring to know that someone has already used an arduino for exactly what I was going to use it for. I like the idea of the shield, however since I am a hardware guy and already purchased a Nano for this project, I am going to use the ideas of the shield to build my own board. I am using a AD7249A for my 12-bit SPI DAC. Haven't decided how to interface to the laser yet but it sound like the R2R is the way to go. When it comes to software I can get by, but since I spend my day to day in PLC and Labview land I do not have much practice with C/C++ interfaces. Hence the issue I am having.

    I am having an issue with communicating to the OLSD Test program. I have connected the CTS pin (Pin 11) of the FTDI chip to I/O point 7 on the Nano. I have uploaded the OLSD.hex file using ArduinoUploader (which is a very nice interface for uploading .hex files to pretty much any arduino). My Nano is connected to COM 18 of my computer. When I run the OLSD Test MFC and press connect, I get "failed to initialize OLSD". I am not sure if this test program is looking for the Nano on a specific COM or not. And if it is looking for a specific COM I do not know how to change which COM OLSD Test is looking at. Has anyone else ran into this issue? It sounds like many of you have used the OLSD with no issues.

    Let me know if there is any other piece of the puzzle you need to know in order to help. Any help you can give me is greatly appreciated.

  6. #26
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    Feb 2009
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    East Coast of Southern Virginia
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    Hi Jason,

    The new board I am working on uses the same Microchip DACs (8 bit version) for the Color/Laser outputs. They are just a little more expensive than an R2R DAC but have better characteristics... and take much less time to solder onto the board (my main reason). I would suggest using those.

    Make sure you are using the correct version of the firmware (V3 and V4 use different IO pins for the CTS drive). You might also want to look to see what the description of your FTDI chip is... as the OLSD test program opens the port base on the description. If you still have trouble after checking those things then I can cook up a special version that tells us where it is failing. I will also try to look at the program tonight to make better suggestions.

  7. #27
    Join Date
    May 2013
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    Fort Mill, SC
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    The FTDI chip on my Nano is FT232RL. I believe this is the same chip as the Duemilanove. I am using the V4 firmware and I/O pin 7 connected to CTS pin on FTDI chip. My OS is windows 7 for what its worth.

  8. #28
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    May 2013
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    Fort Mill, SC
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    Looks like the description in my Device manager is "USB Serial Device". I have been looking into some of your code. It looks like you are expecting "USB HS Serial Converter" is that correct? What is the easiest way to change this so the descriptions match between the code and the device?

  9. #29
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    May 2013
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    Fort Mill, SC
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    Ok good news is I can now communicate with the OLSD test program using the Nano. Thank you cfavreau for leading me down the path of device description. That was the key to getting communication to work. I also knew that I would need to alter to code to work with my DAC IC. Seemed like a simple thing to do, but of course I am still struggling to make it work. When I run the OLSD test program I basically have spaghetti, not the ILDA test pattern I am looking for. I decided to take a step backwards and use the Arduino example to make a circle. I figured if I can get that code to work then I could prove to myself that the DAC IC is going to be suitable for this project. Again made some small code changes to the OLSD.cpp file to change the masking to work with my DAC IC and again it produced a spaghetti circle. So I took another step backwards again and changed the Arduino code so that it would not send any point over 8191. Well actually I experimented with lots of numbers till I realized that 8191 was the largest number I could send to the OLSD.OutputPoint function and produce a correct circle. Not quite sure yet why this is the magic number at this point. The way I interpret the code is that any 16 bit unsigned number can be sent and the first thing the output function does is shift (>> 4) to make it a 12 bit number and then cap the max with a compare statement. Anyway just wanted to give an update on my progress getting OLSD to work with a Nano and a AD7249 12 bit DAC.

  10. #30
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    Feb 2009
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    East Coast of Southern Virginia
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    I think I can help again. I will explain exactly where to look for making it work with your DAC chip. The code is a bit optimized so it may appear hidden at first.

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