Scannermax 506s

[planters]

I'm an amateur; so is anyone who doesn't do this for money.
Anyway, whether these are $10-30 or $90 or $125 each, they are roughly in the DT price range. They are not earth shaking in terms of performance, but they are good. They up the bar for price/performance considerably. And, at least in the near term they require you to source the amps (thanks Steve), and some appropriate power supplies. These are not yet turn key systems in a nice neat box.

[laserist]

I'm an amateur; so is anyone who doesn't do this for money.
Snip

Actually I think a huge percentage of the people doing this for money are amateurs...

[JohnYayas]

Actually I think a huge percentage of the people doing this for money are amateurs compared to me...

Fixed it for you.

[planters]

No. I disagree. If you do this for money you are a pro. You may be inexperienced and loose money in the endeavor, but unless it is so rare that you feel you can get away with it, you need to determine if you have a tax liability. Even if you don't deduct the cost of your equipment and don't have any employees you still have this responsibility. Now, anyone that has deduced my politics would understand that I am not advocating paying taxes, just that the definition of amateur vs professional can be seen this way. I think people often use amateur as derogatory and I don't agree with that. Einstein and Jessy Owens were both amateurs. We're in good company.

[mixedgas]

For the record Planters has the first two pairs of the amps I'm importing, modified by Bill. Those were the test articles sent to Orlando. Bill has sent me the last details of the mod, so now the ball is in my side of the court. Digikey shipped the special diodes for the clipper/nonlinear circuit on Saturday, they should be here Monday-Tuesday.

Steve

[Pangolin]

Early in the development of the 506, Bill made it clear that these were designed to be easy to manufacture

Correct. Different, and easy. We made a video about it that you can see here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ih8HdpDLyy0

but still not outperforming the EMS system I have

I don't mean to sound defensive, but do want to point out that we're comparing apples to oranges here. See the picture below, which is a system we are shipping to Carl B tomorrow:


A few things are noteworthy:
1. Our entire X-Y block including both scanners and both mirrors is comparable in size to a single EMS scanner all by itself.
2. The cost of a Compact 506 system is around 1/3 of that of the EMS system planters is referring to.
3. Scanner amplifiers will dissipate 1/4 the heat of EMS amps, and scanners will also dissipate less heat as well.
4. Our mirrors really and truly reflect a 5mm beam through greater than 40 degrees in all directions. X mirror reflects the 5mm beam through 60 degrees. EMS really do not reflect a 5mm beam very far, and anyone can do simple trigonometry to find out why...

To *truly* project a 5mm beam through a wide range of angles this takes a mirror that is the size of our mirror. There is a cost to this size mirror -- the cost being inertia. As you can see in the picture, the inertia of our true 5mm mirror set is more than double that of EMS "5mm" mirror. If you put our mirror on any other scanner it would squeal like hell. Compact 506 will drive this mirror with no problem up to 50K with no notch filter at all (we eliminate the notch filter in our modification).

Planters knows all of this and I am sure will confirm it. In fact, I am a little surprised he didn't mention these points actually...

Bill

PS: As we are finishing work on the system shipping to Carl B, we have simplified the mod for DT-40 amps, and also added mods for a few other amps too. The updated modification document is here:
http://www.pangolin.com/_Files/C506_AmpMods.pdf

[Carl B]

@ Bill
An observation of the photo of my new scanners has drawn my attention to the white nylon item that is attached to the end of the galvos. Is this item something that will need removing before putting them to use?

Carl

[andy_con]

its a free pangolin sweet, have a chew carl

@ Bill
An observation of the photo of my new scanners has drawn my attention to the white nylon item that is attached to the end of the galvos. Is this item something that will need removing before putting them to use?

Carl

[DZ]

Bill, any chance you can publish the TurboTrack mod for the 506's? At some point I'll retire the G-120's and replace them with the 506's but I intend on keeping the TurboTracks for a long time.

[Carl B]

its a free pangolin sweet, have a chew carl

Well it better be peppermint flavour or there going back.