Jumping into the self-build fray

[Galvonaut]

I have all this to come!

Parts are slow as chillies still keeping me busy - ordered some bits from Rob at Stanwax but need to give him call to discuss things. I am going to have a play with my intended enclosure tomorrow, measure up and maybe order a nice slab of Aluminium and some soft-close kitchen drawer runners (I have a strange enclosure).

[frostypaw]

Can't wait to see this enclosure! Is it to hide it inside some units in an entertainment room kinda thing?

I'm bracing to clean everything then maybe start playing with a spatial filter. I think most of my scatter is from the galvo mirrors which seem to attract dust like a magnet as they're filthy already, but there's also slight wings on the output when it gets to the very low end kinda like -o- doesn't need doing but it's still fun.

Want to do some beamshow programming now though - the pencil-line fine beams look spectacular like proper huge lasershow quality but in miniature, watching them wave and spread is a joy. Going to borrow a mate's old handycam and see if it will film it better too

[Galvonaut]

Can't wait to see this enclosure! Is it to hide it inside some units in an entertainment room kinda thing?

.....

I rescued an old carpeted cassette player rack mount enclosure which will have a narrow form factor the way that I intend to use it. I'm going to remove the carpet and make it look sexyish. I want all of the optics easily accessible - so it will be a case of 4 chunky screws and the whole lot slides out on bearings.

[frostypaw]

Today a video after finishing a new show - make sure you flick to 720p, the 480 default is jerky.



Camera still hating it!

The carpet on that enclosure might be a blessing keeping it silent - easier access would be nice, will be worried shutting mine up at all, sure it'll have to come apart twenty times after.

Lesson learnt lately is diodes warm up and the first ten minute's colour balance is different to thereafter. Had been driving myself mad tweaking up and down each time. I think that's the diodes not the drivers, settled on a sort of inbetween that results in things being a little off but OK in both situations

[swamidog]

nice work!


"the myth of the killer ape is true"

Today a video after finishing a new show - make sure you flick to 720p, the 480 default is jerky.



Camera still hating it!

The carpet on that enclosure might be a blessing keeping it silent - easier access would be nice, will be worried shutting mine up at all, sure it'll have to come apart twenty times after.

Lesson learnt lately is diodes warm up and the first ten minute's colour balance is different to thereafter. Had been driving myself mad tweaking up and down each time. I think that's the diodes not the drivers, settled on a sort of inbetween that results in things being a little off but OK in both situations

[Galvonaut]

Nice photons Frostypaw!

.... my build just got a little more complicated. My wonderful friend George has just donated 2 rotary star gratings on 2 rpm motors, 2 stationary gratings (1 line and 1 star) a piece of lumia glass, 3 first surface mirrors on actuators and a motor controller!

I have an idea for the look of the box - so carpet is coming off (hopefully)!

[frostypaw]

nice work!


"the myth of the killer ape is true"

Cheers was pleased with that

Cleaning has made a great difference too, though ordered some reagent acetone as tech cleaner IPA left some mist - nonetheless beam far better. Made a ultra-basic beam filter by blasting through a light grey paper which left lots of diffraction mess from the edge which cleaned up after a little enlargement all round - it's surprising how much good it did, but it's mostly intercepting the random scatter from the IPA haze really.

[frostypaw]

I've been having fun. Two achromats have made their way into my possession - along with some framebuilding materials



It's got a box cutting the lid has caused me pause - two sides are bang on but I've got to make some awkward cuts to bring the other sides parallel and I had a proper overheat issue when I left it on for a night's programming with no venting to the power supplies which do get very warm.

That led to my green diode turning into a gorgeous shady of mintygreen led :/ I had been running it hard. luckily I'd been given a 'cheap green diode' which turns out to be a PLP520-B1, so after a brief life as a pointer it made it into the projector - the white balance at nearer 1:1:1 is faaaaaaaaar better than at 'equal brightness' - based on other's measurements and my currents I'm at 150-120-180mW RGB.

This really exposed a glaring difference between the 2-element green-coated lens and the G2 which produced a far tighter beam albeit with a bit more splash out the sides. The different threshold really bit too as getting it to match the others in the low end was awkward, but it's close enough for now.

The PVA is working nicely to bond elements down - a few drops of water and some patience and it's moveable again then it just sets back into the new position.

So onto the achromats - courtesy of surplus shed and an ebay buy 'cos I was an idiot and bought a galilean rather than keplerian set, but I'm sure I'll find some use for it - attached to some right angle brackets in a proper british quality engineering fashion. They will be glued and bolted down once I can face the drilling into a nicely working projector. The surplus shed achromats were $7.50! Sure it's got a few flaws but it's 18mm and considering the tiny fraction of it I'm using it was easy to dodge them, heck can buy three at that price and pick your favourite.

In close up on the focal point it seems to work very nicely

but I'll need to fix it down properly to do any decent job with a spatial filter - the focal point is over the bracket's foot so can't even play really. The divergence seems amazing now though and having a secondary focus control has it's own bonus - focusing it all on a wall and drawing 1mm superbright lines is fun.

Interestingly (for me) it's done a vast amount for beam quality with no extra messing around. Almost all the splash and wings have vanished. I've got a 2.67x expansion going on with a 2mm beam so it's clipped at the mirrors which might be doing the trick - I'm suspicious that the process itself results in the gross aberrations following an exaggerated path and never making it there leaving only the in-beam noise which is very low. More experimentation to follow

Also included an AR window from stanwax which seems very effective, but no idea what the actual transmission/reflectivity is - certainly a vast improvement on the reflections from the plain glass I had in there. Trying to figure out how best to pass all my wiring through panels next - I've got a few 20mm grommets just need to work out something clever to do with annoying ribbon cables.

Acquired some 10K double pots to put analogue scaling in too - this feels like a settings nightmare, but worth the experiment I think. BBE is being a star with support on his drivers over an odd problem I'm not entirely sure isn't all my doing too, deserves a mention - just minor trace glow when modulation should be at 0 - not sure it's not down to the DAC. Anyhow there's the ramble - I like this hobby.

[Draco]

so going away from the flex mob P3 fixed the blank areas you where having in the blue and red? i am kinda stuck with the flex mods due the investment in the cost but i never ran into that problem, honestly the only faulty ones i fixed where just set up wrong, but i have only had experience with about 8 of these beasties all version 3.3.

also i may have missed this in posts so forgive me for asking but what software and DAC are you using ?

[frostypaw]

Ah no don't fret - think you might have some wires crossed there. I was never on Flexmods, though I'd like a few to try now, and it was the green and blue that misbehaved anyway

I was on Lasertack's drivers which just weren't linear at the very low end. I suspect if I had more hungry diodes they would have been fine, but they simply couldn't turn down low enough and producing strobing output at those low levels. They said they were going to test those diodes themselves, but I never heard back.

I'm currently on Simpledrive r7's from x-wossee on eBay or BBE here. They've been just grand, and BBE is good and helpful (and they're half the price)

More recently I had some problems with traces for a while and was very confused as I wasn't sure when it started - turns out there was a bug in the driver software that meant the "minimum points" slider had been reversed. Having now set it to 0 my frames now always come out with enough points and everything is crisp and lovely I think I was just seeing the traces as they were being gone over hundreds of times per frame. All strictly unrelated to the drivers

I'm using Dynamics and an Easylase LC USB job. It works fine but has made me much more curious about different software and dacs though, hoping if I go to UKLEM there'll be a chance to try a load of different ones out.