Laser Projector (Red, Green, Purple) "Laser 3D Party Light" from Spencer's

[tribble]

I've noticed another issue with high-speed playback.

I made some ~55MB ild files of long spiro sequences and was playing them back at speed 27. IDK if it's my card, but after playing 50-75% of each of them, it just spazzed out the remainder and jumped to the next file. I reconfigured the playback configuration to play them at speed 25, and no issues. Odd.

[prjoly]

I purchased one of these laser but for some reason when I put the new SD card in the laser I get no lights. I formatted the new SD card (32) but still did not work any ideas. I edit the .prg file with the names of the saved programs.
when I put the SD card that came with the laser back in the unit it works

[prjoly]

Tribble what was the comands did you use to format the card

[kwolfe]

I think DogP said its picky about the cards it reads - some of his didn't work but others did. Right now I'm still using the card it came with. Not sure what you mean by 32, your card is SD and not SDHC right?

BTW, Windows XP wouldn't let me set the allocation size in the Format GUI, so I had to use this command line: format <SD card letter, i.e. f:> /fs:fat32 /q /a:512 . Of course make sure you have all your files backed up off your card, because it will erase it.

[DogP]

I purchased one of these laser but for some reason when I put the new SD card in the laser I get no lights. I formatted the new SD card (32) but still did not work any ideas. I edit the .prg file with the names of the saved programs.
when I put the SD card that came with the laser back in the unit it works

Yes, I found it to be picky about which cards worked with it. I'd stick with SD (not SDHC), and the Elite Pro brand seems to work the best (they all seem to come with that brand card, and I got a 2GB one, and Tribble got a 4GB one, and they've all worked). One like: http://www.ebay.com/itm/261065743630 . Or, if you just make a backup of the "picture" directory on your original card, you should be able to go back to the stock configuration anytime.

It does seem that this supports SDHC though. I just popped in a cheap 16GB class 2 SanDisk Micro SDHC (w/ adapter) and it started right up.

DogP

[prjoly]

Yes, I found it to be picky about which cards worked with it. I'd stick with SD (not SDHC), and the Elite Pro brand seems to work the best (they all seem to come with that brand card, and I got a 2GB one, and Tribble got a 4GB one, and they've all worked). One like: http://www.ebay.com/itm/261065743630 . Or, if you just make a backup of the "picture" directory on your original card, you should be able to go back to the stock configuration anytime.

It does seem that this supports SDHC though. I just popped in a cheap 16GB class 2 SanDisk Micro SDHC (w/ adapter) and it started right up.

DogP

Yes I just order elite pro cards I hope that works

[DogP]

I'm still trying to find time to build my sound card DAC... but in the mean time I wanted to post these schematics. It's the updated galvo amp schematic, as well as the laser driver and XY output (post-DAC) circuit schematics.





In the galvo amp schematic, I just fixed the error on the left side by the 2k resistors, and labeled the circuit areas as the Cambridge areas were labeled. There's not much to the other schematic... the XY output just shows the signal chain from the DAC output to the signal output of the board to the galvo amp (only one of the circuits is drawn, X and Y are identical). The laser driver circuit is basically the reference circuit from the CN5611 datasheet. The interesting thing is that there's an extra CN5611 in parallel on the green circuit. I'm guessing it's supposed to bias the green laser for faster on, but I don't think it does anything useful. With the 180k resistor, it drives ~5mA... I don't think that's enough to make a difference.

Row of dots, before:
Attachment 36478

Row of dots, after:
Attachment 36479

I wasn't able to reproduce this result...running the files you attached, I get lines between the dots (sorry for the terrible pics, I didn't notice that the camera was so poorly focused when I took the pics):

Before:


After:


I made another test file, just to make sure... it's just two rows of 11 dots, and I ran it through tribble's spencerizer. You can see that without the spencerizer, it drags the laser out longer than it should. But with the spencerizer, it looks to turn the laser on before it should (and something odd looks to happen on the second to last dot).

Before:


After:


DogP

[DogP]

BTW, I spent some time reproducing the LaserBoy build environment on a fresh XP machine. Here are (hopefully) complete steps... of course, let me know if it doesn't work for you. There may be some shortcuts, or better way to do things... but this works, doesn't require too much changing stuff, and isn't too difficult. In the case of the boost libraries, if you'd like, I can send you my already compiled ones, so you don't have to go through the hassle of building them.

install wxDev-C++ - http://wxdsgn.sourceforge.net/

install CoreUtils for Windows (recommended to get Unix utilities, such as rm for the makefile) - http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/coreutils.htm

add C:\Program Files\Dev-Cpp\MinGW32\bin and C:\Program Files\GnuWin32\bin to the path
  right click My Computer->Properties->Advanced->Environment Variables
   under System variables, edit Path, and insert the directories with ';' between entries

download LaserBoy source - http://laserboy.org/
 extract to your desired destination

download SDL development libraries - http://www.libsdl.org/
 extract to C:\Program Files\Dev-Cpp\MinGW32
 extract "SDL" directory to C:\Program Files\Dev-Cpp\MinGW32\include
 extract contents of "lib" directory to C:\Program Files\Dev-Cpp\MinGW32\lib

download Boost 1.45.0 - http://www.boost.org/
 extract to C:\Program Files\Dev-Cpp\MinGW32
 extract "boost" directory to C:\Program Files\Dev-Cpp\MinGW32\include
 build boost
  edit C:\Program Files\Dev-Cpp\MinGW32\boost_1_45_0\tools\build\v2\engine\src\build.bat
   replace C:\MinGW with C:\Program Files\Dev-Cpp\MinGW32\bin
  run C:\Program Files\Dev-Cpp\MinGW32\boost_1_45_0\bootstrap mingw
  run C:\Program Files\Dev-Cpp\MinGW32\boost_1_45_0\bjam --toolset=gcc
 copy C:\Program Files\Dev-Cpp\MinGW32\boost_1_45_0\bin.v2\libs\system\build\gcc-mingw-4.6.1\release\link-static\threading-multi\libboost_system-mgw46-mt-1_45.a to C:\Program Files\Dev-Cpp\MinGW32\lib
 copy C:\Program Files\Dev-Cpp\MinGW32\boost_1_45_0\bin.v2\libs\filesystem\build\gcc-mingw-4.6.1\release\link-static\threading-multi\libboost_filesystem-mgw46-mt-1_45.a to C:\Program Files\Dev-Cpp\MinGW32\lib

edit Makefile.win in the LaserBoy "src" directory
 on the line with LIBS =
  change -lboost_system-mgw34-s-1_42 to -lboost_system-mgw46-mt-1_45
  change -lboost_filesystem-mgw34-s-1_42 to -lboost_filesystem-mgw46-mt-1_45

open LaserBoy.dev from the LaserBoy "src" directory with wxDev-C++
 go to Project->Project Options->Build Options
  set the Executable output directory to the LaserBoy directory
   this lets wxDev-C++ know where the executable is, so you can run the program from wxDev-C++ (important if running in debug)
 open any cpp file from the list (otherwise "Execute" will be grayed out)
  click Execute->Compile
   compiled file will be in LaserBoy directory

to run in Debug mode
 edit Makefile.win in the LaserBoy "src" directory
  on the line with CPP =, append "-g"
  on the line with all:, remove "strip"
 rebuild entire project with Execute->Rebuild All
 run with Debug->Run

DogP

[tribble]

I wasn't able to reproduce this result...running the files you attached, I get lines between the dots (sorry for the terrible pics, I didn't notice that the camera was so poorly focused when I took the pics):

Before:


After:


I made another test file, just to make sure... it's just two rows of 11 dots, and I ran it through tribble's spencerizer. You can see that without the spencerizer, it drags the laser out longer than it should. But with the spencerizer, it looks to turn the laser on before it should (and something odd looks to happen on the second to last dot).

Before:


After:


DogP

That is odd. What speed were you projecting the patterns at? Back when I was writing the spencerizer, I was always using speed 20.

I have a backlog of things here I need to look at, but I'm going to be very pressed for time through mid-April. :-( Thanks for posting, though; I'll follow up on this when I can!

Also, thanks for the updated schematics and the laserboy build system build instructions! All of this is on my list... but you know... life gets in the way. :-)

[james]

The latest two versions of LaserBoy (http://laserboy.org/code/LaserBoy_2013_02_28.zip and http://laserboy.org/code/LaserBoy_2013_02_18.zip) are built with MinGW (GNU environment with GCC 4.7.2), Boost-C++ 1.53.0, SDL 1.2.15, and Dev-C++ as a code editor.

Look here for instructions on how to setup the build environment for Windows:
http://laserboy.org/forum/index.php?...;topicseen#new

NOTE: These instructions will provide you with single threaded libs for Boost (not the mt versions) and additions to Makefile.win give instructions to the linker to static link to the GCC C/C++ libs, Boost libs and parts of SDL lib. SDL.dll is still necessary because it cannot be statically linked.

James.