Scannermax 506s

[planters]

First of all I resent your discussing my inches in public. I thought we agreed to keep this our "little secret". Second, haven't you heard our President? No respectable person would admit to being an American. And finally, I wouldn't give a Quid about how the Euro stands vs the Ruble vs the Canadian Dollar vs the Australian Dollar vs the American Dollar.... but with the international market for photonic products we all do this all the time. Thank god for PayPal.

[The_Doctor]

Funny. About mixing units, it has its advantages. 4mm is very close to 5/32'' so if a hole must be finely finished and precisely 4mm diameter, a reamer can do this after drilling with a cheap 5/32'' drill, instead of a more expensive fractionally accurate metric one. These conveniences are not consistent but there are lots of them at various scales. 6mm and quarter inch can be usefully related in many contexts. Another one is 7/32'' (5.556mm) for when a tight fit is wanted for a 5.6mm laser diode. 11/32'' at 8.73mm might be too small for a 9mm laser diode, but it could be useful in a soft mount like aluminium or copper.

[planters]

Again, here I agree with you 100% (+/-1/16). Being able to access both systems means you have more options to meet a tight tolerance. In all seriousness, however the English/metric debate is one that every American school child is forced to suffer through. Unless you agree the measurement system you have grown up with is inferior and you renounce it then you must accept your second class status. Of course, it would be easier if the entire world use one coordinated measuring system, but I say "vive la différence"

[The_Doctor]

Thankyou. Should I keep score? What I do is try to remember a few fast conversions based on lots of useage. It's fairly easy to do 19mm for three quarter inch, etc, and then it's a question of what error we'll accept. That last one matches very closely too, strictly 19.05mm, and few engineers would begrudge that 0.05.

[White-Light]

First of all I resent your discussing my inches in public. I thought we agreed to keep this our "little secret".

That's only because when you say you have a foot, we can say we have a metre!

We have them 3 times longer this side of the Atlantic.

[kecked]

I am American and I use metric for everything except temperature because I have no personal reference with it. I find working in mil almost like metric but prefer mm to fractional inches. all those fractions are a pain in the ars.

[Pangolin]

As far as I know, any data we publish on the ScannerMAX site has both units. In the mechanical engineering world, this is called "dual dimensions". Let me know if there is something that refers only to inches (other than our explanation of the VRAD part number, found deep inside the VRAD datasheets).

By the way, our Mach DSP amp (and likely also the Mach MINI) has a built in four-channel oscilloscope, and you can select one of 100 test points for both the X and Y axis to monitor. I was doing some work on our Saturn 1 scanner, in preparation for the Photonics West tradeshow in a few days. Here I show 75 microsecond small steps on our Saturn 1:



75 microseconds is ILDA 120K! I doubt this would be usable as the step size is 0.2 degrees mechanical (0.4 optical). But this is the first time I've ever heard anyone break 100 microsecond barrier on galvo scanners...

Bill

[dave]

Hey Bill,

Seeing as you are going digital with scan amps, do you for see a time when communication between your laser show software and the scanners is purely digital? it seems a little pointless to start out in digital, convert to analogue, then back again..

[swamidog]

that would make them incompatible with all non-pangolin products.

Hey Bill,

Seeing as you are going digital with scan amps, do you for see a time when communication between your laser show software and the scanners is purely digital? it seems a little pointless to start out in digital, convert to analogue, then back again..

[Pangolin]

Hey Bill,

Seeing as you are going digital with scan amps, do you for see a time when communication between your laser show software and the scanners is purely digital? it seems a little pointless to start out in digital, convert to analogue, then back again..

Yes, that's actually already possible. The communication protocol that we use for the little tuning application (that also has this scope and dynamic signal analyzer built in) could conceivably be used to send point data as well. And we've already got hooks in there for our FB4 to communicate directly with this.

Our ultimate vision is to be like Apple. I'm not sure if you've played with Apple products or not. If not, then you'll likely not know what I'm talking about, or what all of the hype is about... If so, then you'll know how the iMac, iPad, iPhone and applications all fit together and work together perfectly. Apple produces the hardware, the operating system, much of the productivity software, the web servers, etc, so it all fits together and works together perfectly. Really perfectly! Because it all came from one company. On the other hand, every time I start my PC it's a minor miracle that it works. Different people made the motherboard, video board, USB adapters, monitor, driver software, operating system, etc. When things to wrong they go wrong in a big way!

Anyway I'll step off the soap box and simply conclude my remarks with yes, what you suggest is obvious, and has obvious benefits. Entire pieces of hardware can be eliminated, and performance can be improved. Clearly...

that would make them incompatible with all non-pangolin products.

Hehe, to quote the people who occupied Wall Street, "we are the 99%" Everyone else will always have options (in this case, analog input which isn't going away any time soon since industrial scanning applications need it too).

Bill