CYGN-B

[Greg]

With grateful humility, may I say I agree. It is amazing progress to have soldered this ridiculous tangle of wires together and out plops Laserium into my lap. Back in the early 1990s I saw in a university's machine room full of fridge sized reel to reel mag storage, all that stuff, and there was a... I don't know what. I haven't been able to find a photo. My view was brief and my memory indistinct. Backplanes of something all facing inwards like the walls of a phone booth, and the most unbelievable Gordian tangle of I think, gray and white twisted pairs. I remember being told they did mods by sending a high current through the system to burn out certain connects. I guess my work must be influenced by having seen that.

Roj, maybe we should choose an old thread to hijack, or start one called something like DIY show systems control, for the purpose of prattling on about the details of our work that are of no significance to Ivan's vision, and the history and workings of Laser Images. I recently had one of those instances of hunting down a bug (non null terminated string being read as an integer) and being perplexed how the system could possibly have worked for so long before a problem showed up.

I think a midi control solution could be useful for an encoder side of the project, allowing the composition of perhaps a superset of the 352 functionality.

Something that is gnawing at me is that there is this person on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/LaserockLaserConcerts/

It was suggested previously that this may be Scott Anderson. Should he not be apprised of our progress toward bringing his artwork back into living form? I, as perhaps many of us here do, avoid social media and don't want a Facebook account. Is there anyone who uses Facebook who might undertake to drop a line to Scott and invite him to this thread?

Are people here ok with multabela as a name? I don't want to ruin a good product with an unpalatable name. I like it because lasermaster1977 coined it, and then the next version that has everything condensed onto a PCB can be called portabela, ha ha. Maybe it could be called the 6B Continued. Votes / suggestions welcome.

Here are the areas I am interested in regarding collaboration:

1 - A system that could mount in front of a projector window and snap diffractive effects in front of the beam would enable the return of an important dimension of the original shows. I have the parts Brian sent of the 6B hardware that did this, but I have no idea how to assemble a device from the parts.

2 - Roj, do you have experience getting all the way through the process of designing, ordering, and getting a populated board? I didn't understand the part about making sure to choose components that can be pick and placed or however that works.

[lasermaster1977]

Greg, the idea of a new thread is a nice one and I think would draw lots of interest.

Your interest and desire to unravel, preserve, recreate and synthesize the famous Laser Images show tapes is inspiring. The trails that you and those like the creators of Radiator have blazed what can be argued to be the start of a new creative renaissance.

[Greg]

I see how what I said may have sounded critical. Honestly, I was just poking fun at myself. That is, I have always wanted to "hijack" something but a "thread" is as extreme as a polite Canadian is likely to get. *I* would like the freedom to prattle, though I assume readers are more interested in results than the minor come and go details of the process. I may grab an old thread, because I am interested in certain details of how your system works.

[laserist]

I just want to say that Ivan took pride when a reviewer wrote that Laserium was a visual art of the future. To help that happen required that the covers come off so anyone who wants to make that future happen could see what the past was about. Thank you Greg for illustrating the past and the possibilities of the future...

[Greg]

Here, due to the triple whammy of a show tape, video footage, and the secrets recounted by a performer, is rock around the clock fairly close, probably, to what was originally intended. How clever to use spiral sweep and rotations in this way. I agree that losing this content to the dust of time would be like losing music itself. I view this number as an abstract visual narrative which is that a clock turns into a dance floor simply by bringing up the gain of one axis. Applause to the choreographers.

Video here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXaiUhxtvfo

[laserist]

As far as choreograpy for Light-years I believe it was mainly John Tilp.

[Greg]

Here's the result of inspecting the five bits of the 352 data frame called "show steps". This information controlled... and I'm not speaking with authority here, scan glasses and beam routing to various lumia effects. I loaded the second half of Laserock Platinum into the 6b emulator and set up a nominal image input and joystick setting, and then just let it run. I hope to have time to post a replay of this soon. I happen to really like all these songs, and the laser show that plays even without any operator input is pretty spectacular. The songs, by the way, are:

Sartori In Tangier - King Krimson
Synchronicity 1 - The Police
Soul Kitchen - X
School - Supertramp
Run Like Hell - Pink Floyd
Planet Claire - The B-52's
Rock 'n Roll - Led Zeppelin

As expected, the show steps exhibit some dynamics in all the numbers. The interesting thing is, during certain passages, the show steps seems to be used as a complement to the percussion, which means the effects were switching very rapidly. This can be seen in the trace, which shows about 3 seconds of data activity. Included is a previously posted photo of some of the scan glass hardware that made this rapid effect switching possible.

[laserist]

Laser Images’ scan through actuator technique worked. The Hermit commented that its rotation into the beam path was a questionable feature, but that didn’t bother me. The scan glass comes up on a musical cue – the rotation is to the cue – the cue is over and so is the rotation – but the scan glass remains. The design problem for me - it wasn’t balanced. Gravity was an issue. Sliding the scan glasses into place would have been a problem for Laser Images unless you did it vertically. And there’s gravity again. Why was it a problem? Sliding horizontally (sort of) - say the scan glass is two inches wide - you’d need 4 inches per scan pair minimum, and the original head was built in a 19” rack. It wouldn’t fit. One of the early design criteria was projector foot print. They wanted to keep it as small as possible. Planetariums back then cared about every seat. They still do. Even though they rarely fill them. Laser Images’ first projectors were designed with the Spectra Physics 164 lasers mounted as close to vertical as the warrantee restriction allowed. The tube was installed backward to make it less likely that bore material would fall onto the rear Brewster window. The Mark IV had a scan glass tray that a big old rotary solenoid slammed into place for Tank in Laserium I. The Mark VI had 3 scan glasses per scanner activated by linear solenoids behind the scan panel using coaxial brass tubing to connect to the scan glasses. When business slowed down to the point that we wanted to run multiple shows in the same week on even day – the scan glass mounting design was modified to allow the scan glasses to be swapped quickly. So anyone designing a scan glass system for today – be it linear or rotational - consider designing in a quick change capability – from the start.

[Greg]

That cleared things up a bit. Now we can see that we have the essentials of a full 6b scan glass system. Brian again, for preserving so many unique and important specimens of an otherwise lost medium. What is missing is the rolled steel pins, the steel rods, the knurled screws for the clamps, and then the DIYable stuff including the solenoid interface bar, the brass tubing, and a mountable chassis. Perhaps these missing materials are not difficult to obtain if one knows what to ask for.

I see how to assemble the scan glass quick swap mechanism. Very clever. I would never have thought of the pull the screw to release latch.

Also, that discussion about the rotation of the scan glass being the cue gave me a flashback. I remember that used very prominently in the Zeppelin number coming up soon for analysis. So the point of a scan glass system yet to be built is to play these cues as close to the original as possible. Anyone remember, was there any regularity to the 3 effects used across the channels such as diffraction, fuzz, and something else?

I was really into Hitchhikers for a while back in the 1980s, especially the Infocom text adventure with InvisiClues.

[laserist]

There's some confusion evidenced in your post. There were no knurled clamping screws just ordinary cap screws. And the scan glasses were driven by the diode logic board.

The solenoid driver circuit for the scan glass solenoids was clever. It used +/- 20 volts or so to activate the solenoid and then switched one of the voltages to ground to reduce the current to just hold the scan glass in place.

I did have the scan glasses individually addressable as well as having manual control of the Lumia actuators in 2013, but I have it on very good authority that I'm odd...