The noob got his new toy!

[SpyroS]

They arrived! thanks Dave!
Well what to say... lets start with the service, top marks, my account was buggy as hell so Dave did a manual order and shipped it out to me. It took 6 days to get here from China to South Africa, not bloody bad going!

Work has been taking up all my time, so progress is a bit slow... started drilling the aluminium plate and mounted all the goodies on it... Fired her up and lucky the first time! (note to self cheap laser modules have crappy ttl modulation!!!) will have to upgrade that next

Anyway the packaging was amazing, it was like a chinese torture toy... static wrapped, bubble wrapped and then surrounded in foam and then taped up so tightly even customs wouldn't bother opening it

Quality looks to be good... all clean and shinny...

The DMX board it comes with was a bit disapointing... no surprise! the pre programmed graphics are crap and all the good ones it only shows for a few seconds I would have preffered a board more aimed towards beam shows and not birds flying and chinese words i can't read....

I was building Norms original DAC.... but the scanner amps have a differecial input +5/-5 and ground and norms DAC only has to outputs + and ground... now I have tried the Sound card DAC to hit the same problem!! If there is someone out there that has built the dam things PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE put a tutorial up for people that have very basic electric knowledge!!!

And here are some pics so far... videos to come as soon as I have some time and enough people to smoke hubbly to fill a room with smoke.. DIY smoke machine

[James Lehman]

Just ask a lot of questions! There are a lot of people here who love to go on and on about this stuff. Keep it in a public thread and then others can chime in and make corrections or clarifications if needed.

It looks like you've got a good start!

So you are in South Africa !?

Neato!

If you plan on going with a sound card, the first thing you need to do is decide whether to use an internal PCI card or an external USB device. The correction amp is the same either way. But getting power to it is something to consider. It takes positive and negative voltage to make it work. If you go with an internal PCI card, you can get +/-12VDC from the PCI slot and bring it out on wires with the signals. If you use a USB device you might want to power the correction amp with the scanner PSU.

James.

[SpyroS]

Yep! good old RSA crazy little country we are!
Questions... got tons of those!
I'm already bored with the DMX board, so now i need a DAC!!! opting for your sound card DAC.. still in progress.. PM'ed you about the opamps..

[SpyroS]

Here is the audio coupler... most of it i can make out...
Q. how is it connected to a audio signal?
Q. Vcc, Vdd and the funny arrows on each side, what are they and what are they connected to?

And here is the opamp( thanks highvolt!) for the FB3...
Q. WTF?
Q. How is it connected to the audio coupler?

My brain hurts
Is there someone that could draw the schematic from start to finish for simple minds

My DAC fund has started.. between student life and work I should have the money by the time i'm 30

Thanks to everyone who has helped so far and to all those that will most probably be helping..

[James Lehman]

Here is the audio coupler... most of it i can make out...
Q. how is it connected to a audio signal?
Q. Vcc, Vdd and the funny arrows on each side, what are they and what are they connected to?

And here is the opamp( thanks highvolt!) for the FB3...
Q. WTF?
Q. How is it connected to the audio coupler?

My brain hurts
Is there someone that could draw the schematic from start to finish for simple minds

My DAC fund has started.. between student life and work I should have the money by the time i'm 30

Thanks to everyone who has helped so far and to all those that will most probably be helping..

I think we're mixing apples and hubcaps here dude!



Take a good look at some of the pictures here:
http://akrobiz.com/laserboy

To do RGB laser projection, you need at least 5 channels. A 5.1 surround sound card has 6. That gives you a set of 6 separate control signals to send to the various parts of your projector. {X, Y, R, G, B, I}. But you need to fix the sound card so that it is electrically matched to the requirements of your laser system. That is what the outboard op-amp thing is for. Note that the drawing on the schematic is only one channel. You need to make a set of six of these; one for each channel.

James.

[SpyroS]

Right...... Ok ok.... I have the pats for Norm's DAC so I will now be building it(dam noobs can't make their minds up!) anyway.........
Norms DAC outputs a 10V signal, can I plug it into the ILDA plug on my DMX card without it frying everything or do I need to drop the voltage down to 5V???

I read laserfx's info on the ILDA pinout and they spoke about 10V and 5V so which does it use?

[James Lehman]

You scanners draw the image. So it makes good sense to be able to control the output voltage with a stereo volume pot or something similar. Start at 0 volts. Work your way up to the size of the scan you want, that doesn't blow your scanners away. That is your voltage. Individual pots for each channel are part of the LaserBoy correction amp.

The color mods are all going to be 0 to +5VDC for analog modulation or just 0 or 5VDC for TTL.

James.

[SpyroS]

Thanks James!!! I'm going to attempt a build this weekend of Norms DAC(work is no fun, would rather be playing with lasers) just realised the sound card I have is very old, only has to channels got all the parts for the DAC, just waiting for a reply from Norm about the output voltage......

[James Lehman]

I'm sure he knows what he's doing. His device will get you there.

James.