The LaserBoy Thread

[james]

This has been a trip I hope soon takes a turn. We just got back into our house on November 3rd. It's still way out of order. November 18th my spouse Terry fell and broke his hip. He went to the hospital and had a pin and screws put in. Was there for a while and got moved to Rockyknoll nursing home for pt rehab. Low O2 on December 16th. Taken to er very early 17th. Tested positive. He told me immediately. He had 2 shots and a booster. He never got really sick but they admitted him because he has several high risks factors and he was already in their care when he got it. He got that remdesavir antiviral. He just got released back to Rockyknoll a white ago.

When he told me he had it, it really scared the shit out of me, for his sake. I then was hypersensitive to any signs of symptoms. I noticed I was coughing and my nose was running more than usual. I got chills, a very low grade headache, muscle ache and a little nausea. It got worse. I had very low energy. I didn't get really sick. I was more worried about both Terry and I getting worse. I felt pretty crappy. I wouldn't want anyone else to get it. Finally today I got the test results. It was a weird feeling seeing that positive icon thing in the email. It was shocking for a second even though I was already sure I had it. I feel way better today. Almost normal. Knowing that we are both past this and much better and that I probably did not pass it on to anyone else makes me very happy. What a huge relief. I've been naturally altered hopefully for even better protection for the next wave.

Everyone please take this seriously. Get vaccinated and boosted. I'm just about 100% certain that saved Terry's life, maybe even mine.

At this stage of the game, if you are not already vaccinated and you get it and get really sick, just stay home. Don't clog up the hospitals with your almost certainly avoidable illness. You already made your choice to denounce science and modern medicine. Stick with that.



.

[james]

New version of LaserBoy!

https://laserboy.org/code/LaserBoy_Current.zip

This version has a new folder LaserBoy/wave/clips and the app does a better job of organizing wave data.

There is now a new wave file type output. Now a single frame can be output to a wave file that is time optimized but has no lead in or tail out to the origin. This is specifically designed to be used as an image object within a system that can clock it out and do live math manipulations like Derek Holzer's Pure Data Vector Synthesis library.

Did lots of menu functionality taxonomy.

Fixed some nasty bugs.

[james]

Ripple
James Lehman 2022

acrylic on canvas 36" x 48"

This is my first painting of 2022! As some of you know, I've been dealing with a lot of stuff, especially since mid September of last year.

[james]

Dark Radiance
James Lehman 2022

36x36 inch acrylic on canvas

[james]

Recently, dchammonds, Dean, asked about adding a return path (blanked) from the last point back to the first in an ilda file.

From what I can tell, most application developers have their own idea about what an ilda file is and what it should contain.

Is it supposed to be something that can be directly clocked out of a DAC or is it just a way to get art into an application for further processing?

My app has no direct connection to being able to "play" an ilda file, so I don't really have any expectations about that.

It has utilities to make files for SD card readers.

What do you use to display directly from an ilda file?

James.

[lasermaster1977]

Recently, dchammonds, Dean, asked about adding a return path (blanked) from the last point back to the first in an ilda file.

From what I can tell, most application developers have their own idea about what an ilda file is and what it should contain.

Is it supposed to be something that can be directly clocked out of a DAC or is it just a way to get art into an application for further processing?

My app has no direct connection to being able to "play" an ilda file, so I don't really have any expectations about that.

It has utilities to make files for SD card readers.

What do you use to display directly from an ilda file?

James.

IMHO, as the ILDA Image Data Transfer Format Rev 011 implies this is merely a image data transfer format "standard" provided in order to share laser images that are expressed in a standard format, and it in no way implies that all the header and footer data bits must be used by any and all laser display software when displaying the image data. The header's number of points in a frame data can be useful when the footer "End Of File (EOF) " data is ignored. And the number of points in the frame can be ignored if the EOF is used to determine when to loop back to the start of image.

It always made the best sense to me to provide the necessary "beam(s) OFF) command at the end of an image along with the appropriate intra-point or repeat-point delay before the beam(s) are turned on at the start of an image, along with XY DAC driver and RGB software that responds accordingly.

It would seem that the capability dchammond asks for is already there for that blanked return path data to be added at the end of an ILDA frame. Its the DAC driver software that is the key to a successful implementation.

I would think Pangolin's software does this, I know mine does. I only have QuickShow but will soon find out how well it handles blanked return path data with old show images I'm converting to ILDA's format 5.

[james]

When I developed my code to read and write ilda, there were only sections 0, 1 and 2 defined.

I had Anarchy and whatever software came with the old ISA QM-32 laser control card, (on loan from Steve Roberts).

I also had an early version of the ilda spec document.

My code was able to open files made in Anarchy and I could make files that would open in both Anarchy and the QM software.

An ilda file can have any number of frames (or palettes) in it. Each one has a uniform 32-byte section header. In that header is a 16-bit unsigned integer that represents the number of elements in the data portion of that same section. A file reader must know how big each data element is to be able to read it and to calculate the actual size of the whole section in bytes. (This information is not in the file!)

(Therefor) A file reader must know how to read the exact number of elements into the app in order to get all of the section's data and be in the proper position in the file to read the next section header, which could be another frame or palette.

The very last section of an ilda file is supposed to be an ILDA_end, which is a section header with the number of elements set to zero. There is only one of this type of section and it is the last section of the file.

None of this has anything to do with the characteristics of the data that are in each frame (other than the fact that there cannot be more than 65536 elements per section).

A section type 2 is a one-byte indexed palette, so it is nothing more than a list of 256 or less rgb values.

There are no standards pertaining to optimization for any particular type of display software.

This is because optimization to make a frame look good when clocked out of a DAC is an art.

Techniques are subjective and in some cases proprietary.

But there still seems to be some expectations of what it should be!