ust bought first laser projector. trying to figure it out help!

[NinjaDan]

well put. I'm still in the research phase at this point. Unfortunate that I wasted money on this. It did peek my interest greatly though. I need to find what the costs involved are for the license and variance and then once I find out exactly what type of laser equipment I need to purchase is. I knew it was going to be a money-sink from the start, but have always wanted to look into it. I don't get discouraged easily. It looks like the first thing I'll have to do is find out where I can take a laser safety course. I'll assume this will also familiarize me with different equipment and give me a basic idea of what I need to purchase. The bad thing about that is that I'm sure theres nothing close to me and I'll have to travel out of state for this.

[buffo]

I'm not sure that you wasted your money... You can still use it to experiment with in your home, and at some point you might want to take it apart and salvage the components and/or upgrade it.

The costs are variable, depending on how far you want to take this and how fast you want things to happen. Getting things fast costs more! (Naturally)

A laser safety class is going to be tricky to find. There are a few commercial ones out there, but they are almost all geared towards industrial or medical lasers. Light show projectors are a unique case that require some extra topics, and most of those are really pricey. (Couple grand minimum.)

A *great* class to take is the one that Greg Makhov teaches for ILDA. It's also quite affordable at around $500. Unfortunately, you'll probably have to wait until the 2016 ILDA conference to take it. (Next year's conference will be in the Washington DC / Baltimore MD area, and they are talking about a late spring date at this point.)

Getting a variance isn't too difficult, but you also need a certified projector, and that can get expensive. Once you have those, you'll also need a controller and some software. Then you'll need time to play with it to get comfortable running it, and finally you'll probably need a business license, some business insurance, and maybe some extra gear (tripod, truss, or other stand, etc) before you can start doing gigs.

Adam

[NinjaDan]

Well researchville here I come!

[pbecker314]

This lp does what it says, but I don't know whats more abysmal, the soft that came with it or the instructions for the unit. The chinese to english translation is horrific

I don't know if this thread is dead or not, but I recently bought a similar laser, called the "My Effect II", and had the same problems with the horrific manual and the under-performing "Laser Show v1.0" software that came with the laser.

After a lot of trial and error, and very little progress, I got some help from James Lehman, who showed me how to get LaserBoy to create ILD 0 formatted code. Unfortunately, the laser itself does not recognize this format, it only responds to CTN formatted files on the SD card. This is where "Laser Show v1.0" comes back into the picture. It turns put that this program can read the ILD 0 formatted files coming out of LaserBoy, but ONLY if you save them using the "chil" option in LaserBoy. Once you read the resulting ILD 0 file into "Laser Show v1.0", then you can use that program to save the animation in CTN format to the SD card. Using this workaround, I was finally able to achieve custom animations with this very affordable, and fairly bright laser!

Cheers, Pete