Did you read the description of the project before you posted? There is no color balancing.
Let's back up for just a moment. The concept for this device started out as a self-contained, battery-powered box that, when connected to a laser projector, would create a slowly moving dot for a lumia effect. That's it.
Later, Hank decided it would be nice if the unit could also display a few test patterns, because he thought that might be useful if you wanted to do a quick test on your projectors. (Remember: portable, battery-powered, and self-contained.)
Then he figured it wouldn't be too much more work to put together a simple web interface to select the frames. OK, but now it's not exactly self-contained anymore, is it? Still, he felt it was worth the trade-off.
Once that was working, he added the ability to play short ILDA animations. Then he put together a cell-phone app to control the device. He's also tweaked the code to increase the point speed, added some waveform and color choices, and plenty of other tweaks.
At this point, we are already *WAY* beyond the initial design criteria of a self-contained, battery-powered device that makes the slow moving dot that he originally wanted for the lumia effect. It has a built-in webserver. It supports WiFi and Bluetooth. It's got an SD card reader. There's a dedicated phone app. And considering that we're talking about something that costs ~ $150, that's pretty incredible.
But let's be frank: re-mapping 8-bit color data from your ILDA frames into a 12-bit color space AFTER you apply color correction and white balancing is a *VERY* advanced feature that even Pangolin hasn't implemented on any of their hardware yet. Do you really think this should be a priority for a hobbyist device with these design goals, especially when the device doesn't have any color correction to start with (and was never meant to have it)?
Yes, if you save an entire laser show as a string of ILDA files to the SD card, you can use the ILDAC-32 to play the show (sans audio, obviously), and you can trigger the playback either from a web browser or from your smart phone. But the whole purpose of this project was not to build a controller that would replace whatever device you currently have connected to your computer for running laser shows. If someone wants to turn this into a dedicated controller (perhaps by implementing the full Etherdream protocol), then that's cool, but again, this was never the goal of the project.
Agreed. Are you volunteering to write the code to enable color correction curves for the ILDAC-32? Because that was never part of the design criteria (why would it be?). The control software does not support any sort of color correction. (Watch the videos that Hank posted above.)Originally Posted by mixedgas
More to the point, if the "Scaley Anteater" company hasn't implemented this feature yet, what on earth makes you think it's something that would be appropriate for a $150 hobbyist device?
I'm absolutely dumbfounded by these replies... Hank has created a clever unit that ended up being capable of a whole lot more than he ever intended for the project, yet you guys are asking for features that aren't present even on controllers costing 10X more. Seriously guys - WFT?
Adam
EDIT: After getting some rest, I re-read through this post this morning and realized that I sound like a self-righteous dickhead. Sorry about that. I'm still upset about Ed Keefe's passing, and I let those feelings cloud my judgement. I should have waited to post this until later.
Also, upon re-reading, it occurred to me that it's possible that you both assumed that Hank was simply passing the standard 8-bit color data from the ILDA file format directly to his 12-bit output DACs without first up-scaling the data. If he had done that, then yeah, you would lose a huge amount of brightness at the top end. Although this would definitely qualify as a rookie mistake...
Fortunately, Hank was aware of this potential problem. The 8-bit color data is up-scaled to match the 12-bit output of the digital-to-analog converter outputs; thus max brightness in the 8-bit ILDA frame file still yields a full +5 volts on the output of the 12-bit DAC.
Note, however that this is strictly a linear scale conversion (multiply by 16); there is no color curve or white-balance adjustment.