Test Frames Legality

[mixedgas]

Bill, I just have one remark to that,

RS232

(NOUGH SAID?)

How many times have you personally had to make a custom cable to comply to the many poor or nonstandard implementations of the RS232 "standard" and its permutations and clones?, if your like most of us, many, many, times.

Long live the ILDA pattern, and if we need new ones, let them be a industry wide thing. I like interchangable artwork and the ability to compare galvo performance.


I just had a situation where a person thought, because he was trained in the late 80s, on LM amps with just G.P.D, that to adjust 6215s , all he needed was the LM pattern. He didn't understand that the 6215s came tuned out of the box and tried for a wide angle and full speed using just LM and the three pots he thought were g.p. and D. He ignored the ILDA pattern completely, even though he had a pango system and the I.T. frameset. To say that things were a mess was a understatement, as to find the pots he simply turned everything 2 or 3 or more turns each way and did not mark their initial positions. That system was in use, and his employer was not happy. I got him the 6215 manuals to set the boards up correctly with a scope and a printout on tuning to the ilda standards.

This is the danger of having many standards that are poorly defined.
Yeah, granted the guy could have googled "galvo tuning", but he didnt, and they wondered why their new Pango card was messing up. Bill, you might have had a PRO card shipped back to you for a refund because of a lack of understanding of a newer standard by a older technician.

So we need highly coherent (sic) standards. And if there is a new standard, it should come with a way to use older artwork.

I for one do not wish to return to the "my artwork doesnt work on your software/hardware system" days.

Just my two cents. I guess I'm a luddite, but right now at the new job I'm dealing with the machine shop industry, on a finish on a mold, and the standards have not yet updated to cover advances in mold finishes. So I have a cad guy doing a drawing for a 20K$ mold, and we have no "industry standard" way to specify the surface quality beyond SPI A1. I can see the lawsuit now, when the optical product being molded fails.



Steve

[cfavreau]

Ha... not quite the point. I agree with having a standard. Point taken.

This discussion really wasn't about getting rid or even updating the tuning standard (not that it isn't possible), it was/is about the usage of a set of useful test frames that allow a Laserist to test his/her system.

Granted we have the ILDA test frame to do the final tune/testing with however there are better ways to test laser alignment, rough tuning, orientation, color balance and other aspects of a laser projector and the resulting image.

The point of what Bill is trying to get across and I agree with him is that while the set of test frames that exist and are on the ILDA swap site are good and do what we want... there might be "better" test frames not created yet. Since our projectors are changing and our experience grows I am sure this is true.

[buffo]

So long as you keep the elements of the ILDA test frame identical (the size of the center square and the 12 points around it that make up the circle), I don't see any problem with coming up with your own test frame...

I've often thought about editing the LaserMedia test pattern so that the diagonal re-trace lines are drawn in one color when drawn from top left to bottom right, and in another color from bottom right to top left. Say, Yellow one way and Blue another. That way you can tell which axis is slow (or fast) by looking at which color is on top or bottom. And you'll still get a single white line when everything is perfectly aligned, so there's no change there...

Likewise, it would be nice to have a test pattern that combines the quadrature square wave, the LaserMedia test pattern, the center square and circle of the ILDA test pattern, and the color bars of the color blanking speed test pattern all in a single frame. Making such a pattern shouldn't be too difficult, but it's rather low on my priority list.

Nonetheless, I don't see where it would cause any huge "standards war" if someone did create such a pattern and lots of people started using it...

Adam

[drlava]

Nonetheless, I don't see where it would cause any huge "standards war" if someone did create such a pattern and lots of people started using it...

Adam

The assumption is that if someone creates a new test frame that they will then be more free about it than the authors of the frames in question here, eh?

[cfavreau]

I think that would be the assumption. The ones I am making I will release for free use, commercial or private. When/If I do that the only thing that I would ask is to not pass them off as your own... so don't say ... hey I created that ... when you didn't. That would just make you a wanker.

I don't have any way of enforcing a copyright so it will be on your honor type of thing and I reserve the right to call you a wanker if you claim them your own.

[buffo]

I think that was basically Bill's point... That the test patterns that come with Pangolin were created by him (and Patrick), and even though he did give people here on PL permission to use them, he wanted people to know where they came from.

Adam