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Thread: CYGN-B

  1. #11
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    Default CYGN-B photo

    FWIW, I have not only the schematics, etc., but also an actual card (see attached scan below). dsli_jon no longer owns the assets of Laserium, they were sold to Tim Zeigenbein of Lumalaser. They have the intention of bringing back Laserium at some point in the future.

    I'm not sure what the state of the Laserium intellectual property is, so I'm hesitant to release the schematic. I doubt that ANYONE would do a console like ours at Laserium. Nowadays, it's done with far more flexible CPU's, GPU's, DSP's and ASIC's. See the Radiator Kickstarter project for an excellent example (I've ordered one!) Another good example is Aldebaran Systems's Z5Plus console.

    It would be a fairly large challenge to make the board I have work as you would need to wire many many pots, switches and power supplies to it to get it to work.

    Brian, I'd love to see your software emulator. I tried to build a cycloid generator with Processing, but it doesn't really have the speed necessary.

    Greg, if you are interested in Laserium photos, etc. let me know. I'm the self-assigned archivist (no one else volunteered to do all that digitizing!). We have almost 1100 images from shows, 300 videos and more.

    Ron
    Attached Thumbnails Attached Thumbnails CYGn-B.png  

    Last edited by ronhip; 12-22-2019 at 08:47.

  2. #12
    Join Date
    Mar 2010
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    564

    Default

    Thank you for the reply Ron. (insert appropriate word of superlative gleeful stupefaction here) Great photo! I thought I'd never see that. Any chance of seeing the other side?

    I understand about the schematics, but I'm glad to know they exist. Thank you for your preservation efforts.

    I certainly am interested in Laserium photos, especially examples of imagery generated using this board, and / or shows < 1983 but especially anything to do with Starship or LaserockII.

    If anyone is interested in an emulator of the CYGN-B that one can operate in real time by turning knobs (on the screen) and record into .ild files, I have one. It is an image synthesizer building platform called cyc on which a patch of the CYGN-B along with 3D transforms and a bunch of LFOs has been built.

  3. #13
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    Mar 2010
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    564

    Default

    That board looks like it is missing a 555.

  4. #14
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    Jun 2009
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    St. Louis, MO
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    Default

    I hadn't hadn't considered BELA, but I did just glance at the web site. I'm more of a bare metal kind of guy, and take some comfort from Silabs' multi hundred page hardware manuals. I'm using one of their 8 bit processors in a Lumia projector I've been playing with, and it'll be plenty for the CYGN-C. I'm considering one of their 32 bit beasts for something a little more complex.
    "There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun." Pablo Picasso

  5. #15
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    351 decoded 20 bytes 40 times a second. It was comprised of three different wavelength square wave pulses the root frequency was (I think...) 13440hz. A zero bit was one positive and one negative pulse (or negative and positive depending on the ending state of the previous bit) at the root freq. A one was one pulse at root/2 and either positive or negative depending on the ending state of the of the previous bit. The frame of 120 bits started and ended with two positive/negative pulses (or neg/pos...) At root/4.
    "There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun." Pablo Picasso

  6. #16
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    It's my understanding that Lumalaser bought the trademark name and a lot of hardware, but non-exclusive rights to the IP.
    "There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun." Pablo Picasso

  7. #17
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    Jun 2009
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    Ron, the software emulator I mentioned started back in the late 80's and first ran on a 386 without a coprocessor. It was never intended to be a real time thing. I left it running while I went on vacation and came back for one 4k x 4k rgb image. (The code was anything but highly optimized) I stumbled across the code a while back and it still compiled - it did the same image in about 3 seconds on a more modern computer. I dusted it off and had some thoughts about rendering actual Laserium style shows for Fulldome, or video as a way of communicating what Laserium was about, but never took it to that point.
    "There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun." Pablo Picasso

  8. #18
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    Mar 2010
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    That's invaluable information about the 351. The housekeeping would have been about solenoids and actuators I guess.

  9. #19
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    Laser Images patented their projector way back when, so a pretty good idea of how it worked is available. The solenoids in the optical head were controller by 5 bits through a diode logic board, you could have 32 possibilities of zero to N solenoids active. (It was primative, but field programmable with a soldering iron) The other bits controlled beam kills, selecting the inputs to the two image busses, selecting the bus connected to each scan pair, fixed rotation enables, variable rotation enables, spiral reset, diamond spiral enable, triangle audio mod, offset enables, offset selects, and obviously a couple of others I don't remember off hand...
    "There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun." Pablo Picasso

  10. #20
    Join Date
    Feb 2015
    Location
    San Francisco
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    179

    Default 352 data format

    Greg,

    I don't think I'm giving away anything highly proprietary by posting the 352 data format below. We used to have a "bit box" that could generate static 352 data frames for show setup and debugging. I may have one somewhere in my Laserium boxes in the basement somewhere... It was a real pain to use since you had to set ALL the bits manually in each byte! But better than nothing.

    Ron
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