swamidog and lasermaster1977, glad you find these updates interesting! Here's video from the previous test shoot:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBsTfRdK1kA
Progress slowed due to the necessity of lots of soldering. Photo shows the colormod and chopper board, almost complete.
Previous contributions provided not one but two unpopulated CYGN-B boards. Someone had some foresight. No objections pending, I'll use one of these.
If anyone wants to scribble this goes here type of thing on the joystick parts photo...
I'm guessing there might be a schematic for something called JSGN which would undoubtedly be useful to have a look at. Ron?
James: I haven't given up on LiquidMath. It's one of the things I want to get to. Soldering is so much fun though.
The 1/8" thick L bracket with 1 - .375" hole, is for the x axis pot. The 1/8" L bracket with 2 - .375" holes gets a .375" hub in one hole to mount of the x axis pot's shaft. The y axis pot goes in the other hole. There should be a clamp with a .25" hole to attach to the y axis shaft, and the joystick shaft screws into the clamp. A tube slides over the joystick shaft, and the ball screws onto the shaft. There's a joystick gain control board for each joystick near the joystick, and a joystick generator card that generates the various joystick signals for the RYGB scan pairs located in the upper card cage.
I really need to get a package sent off - it includes a flash drive with the info you need.
"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
More brief video clips featuring colormod and CYGN-B here:
https://youtu.be/kW2dbbgnSVU
The last clip shows a sweep of the fm depth of one "digital" oscillator from max to min.
This update is mainly about a cycloid I remember but haven't yet found in the hardware. It was used in the Yes number Awaken in Starship, and was like a circle of spirals. The photo shows some cycloids that are sort of like what I remember, but not quite the same thing. I thought it would be a low resonance KQO with a CYGN-B oscillator using FM to condense the points to a number of nodes around the circle. That doesn't seem to be the case though.
I haven't tried looking for this cycloid using the open loop galvos yet. Perhaps it will show up there.
A side note: My projector appears to have developed a failure in the Y axis. After a few minutes of running, the Y axis becomes jittery and distorted. The input signal looks fine on the oscilloscope.
I remember doing Awaken, but honestly not what I did. I loved Starship. I remember seeing Darryl Davis just knock Awaken out of the park in Studio A in Van Nuys, but I don't remember the image that time either. But it was infinitely slow - enveloping... The thing is - there were 4 scan pairs - spirals with damped joystick would be a really cool way to perform Awaken... And it would look like four spirals moving in a circle as you moved the joystick.
"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
Nice to see your progress, Greg.
I miss the days of 4 pair scanners, RYGB, and the ability to set each pairs XY image polarities individually along with their quadrature DC joystick's polarity assignments. It added a fluid, visual synthetic 3D dimension that was magical.
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Everything depends on everything else
I just got up and looked. I don't have a copy of Starship. So I can't look at the data and see what was intended. Considering the stuff I do have - I would have grabbed Starship if I saw it.
"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
Great story. Great memories.
The CYGN-B PCB build is almost complete, with oscillators 1 and 3 done and tested.
I'm thinking the focus of my efforts should move toward something in the way of choreography. Perhaps it would be a good idea to rebuild the 352 infrastructure to the point where existing show tapes, some of which apparently still exist, and newly composed material could both be explored.
It was written:
I'm unfortunately having to miss a rare opportunity due to the technical details related to being not fully vaccinated at the time of a border crossing. My interest in continuing discussions and development, and hopefully meeting in real life is high. I'm sorry, I just really won't be able to cross the border in time.
There's an unpopulated 352 board in the card cage that I'll have to disassemble to make the USPS's size limits. For some reason I thought the dual one shots used there were no longer made. It appears I was wrong about that. The rest are pretty standard op-amps and 74LS chips except it did use 2 - AD811 dual transistors. If you want to build a complete Laserium data system it was made up of 1 - 352 board, 2 AMUX boards, and 3 - DMUX boards. Each ADMX had a 1 to 8 analog switch and 8 sample/hold and low pass filters. Each DMUX had 2 - 8 bit shift registers with latched outputs if memory serves. All of the DMUX circuits could have fit on one board, but the 44 pin edge connectors were the limiting factor. The filter caps for the low pass filters that smoothed out the 8 bit - 40 samples a second artifacts of the analog signals took up most of the board space.
Sorry you can't make it to Buffalo, it would have been cool to meet up. Maybe some other time...
"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
Attached graphic shows a fraction of a second excerpt of the 351 audio signal obtained by Brian from a 1/4" 4 track show tape. The tape has very low signal level, and the digital version of the signal shown has been multiplied by a large amount in an attempt to increase the gain.
The signal is from "Turn Me On" from Laserock2, during a part in which I'm pretty sure channel gains and beam kills were being controlled by the data.
Other photos show the 6b panel with vector board builds of the cycloid generators. This hardware could now be boxed and transported, and emerge ready to use. The CYGN-B card, as can be seen, has my counter reset circuit added in the top left corner. I installed the mosfet, resistor, and capacitor counter reset on power up scheme as given in the schematic, and shown in the photo of Ron's board, but the mosfets, as before, appear to conduct continuously without switching off, thus holding the associated counters in a reset mode. Perhaps the units I bought are no good.
Final photos show a couple of cycloids generated by combining the CYGN-B with a dogloid using parameters that were not available in the original rom.