Ilda laser,,, diy dac ? software ? arduino control ? dmx?

West i did´t have the problem that you mencion with the sliders.

Im monitoring the DMXOutput from Artnet and its seems that the bottle neck its there, because acording to the dmx specifications ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMX512 )

“Maximum times are not specified because as long as a packet is sent at least once per second, the BREAK, MAB, inter-slot time, and the mark between the last slot of the packet and the break (MBB) can be as long as desired.
A maximum-sized packet, which has 512 channels (slots following the start code), takes approximately 23 ms to send, corresponding to a maximum refresh rate of about 44 Hz. For higher refresh rates, packets having fewer than 512 channels can be sent.”

and watching the “show output” of the Artnet-dmx of freestyler i can see the same refresh rate that my laser its giving me. About 4fps. So i still dont know if the laser its too slow or if the entec card its too slow or if the software its too slow.

Still it was fun to play Pong with kinect :)

Im verry curios about what i can get with the Lumax interface, i did´t find any example of what vvvv can offer with that

hi vcj4

you will have when ding animation or running vidéos… helas !

this sounds more a devices buffer related thing.
Tere is still cheap devices that doesn’t accept :
-Or a complete dmx packet ( 512 channels)
-Or a certain refresh rate of datas (more than 44Hz rate )
and you may experience strange things from them.

If you have blocking issues with artnet or udp, put a mainloop node, set it at 25 or 30 fps foreground/background.
connect a change node to itsframe number output ( on the right)
connect the change node output to the send pin of art-net emitter
if i remember well, little_cat is sending data to the device on change. don’t remember well as this is a very old thing. If this is, the specified approach about change ting will surely work. I have a couple of hours today, i will begin to try to do a plug in in vvvv. But not sure to arrive to it

Check out the LD2000 node, which works with Pangolin Boards directly out of vvvv.
An openLase Plugin

http://www.visualnews.com/tag/openlase/

Should be the future way to go though …

eno i got a pangolin interface, quickshow runs fine, but i cant get ld2000 to work, any idea how to do it ?

hi, can you describe your problem in more detail?
which hardware do you use exactly?
you can contact me on skype:enohenze

Hi eno, great thank you for the help! i will try to call you latter, in the meantime here is the description

i have a 1w rgb laser with a fb3qs , its working great with quickshow. Im running win seven 64b spa. when i plug the fb3qs to the usb the led goes green, when i open quickshow the led goes orange, and when the laser its working the led goes blinking red if its drawing or solid red on blackout.

on vvvv when i create the ld2000 node, i cann see it on vvvv but nothing seems to hapens, the led on the controlers stays green, i try all the pins like corner, dowrite and so, no results at all. what im doing wrong ? is this interface compatible with ld2000 ?

Hi vj4c, I couldn’t really find out what hardware the fb3qs is … How it is being addressed.
I am using the ld2000 node in conjunction with the qm2000 PCI board http://www.pangolin.com/LD2000/qm2000board.htm

Other Hardware has not been tested.

I know, that the ld2000 is a Pangolin protocol that also works on network devices, but I have no idea how your hardware actually operates.

i have the cheapest hardware from pangolin, the fbqs3 is also know as “flashback3 qs” , here you have a picture
http://www.pangolin.com/flashback/flashback3.htm
and im using it with quickshow
http://www.pangolin.com/QS/screenshots/mainscreen1/mainscreen1.html

can you show us what you can do with your interface + vvvv with a patch example ? i need to know if really worth it for what im looking for
tnks :)

Ok, as I understand from the flashback page it is a device that plays back ilda show. You have to load these shows onto the the device before you can play them back.

The LD2000 can’t save full shows to disc, which you could then stream to the Flashback device.

Let me describe how the ld2000 node interacts with the qm2000 board.

The qm2000 has a framestore with a capacity of several thousand frames, depending on the amount of memory installed on the board. One frame can hold a path with up to 6000 points. Paths can also be described as vector graphics, that means for a line you only need to define start and endpoint, the board adds the inbetween points on output.

With the ld2000 node you can access all of these frames. You can write to these frames and play them back. You can set certrain parameters for playback globally and per frame, like output points-per-second (pps), anchor points etc.

In the easiest live application you need only one frame, which you set as output frame and thus play back all the time. You overwrite it’s content in each v4 frame, and the board keeps outuputting that frame in it’s own refresh rate, until new content is written to it by v4.

You can also write to more than one frame of the framestore, which allows for non-realtime rendering of shows, or cuts and edits between certain scenes, if you want to build a whole ‘show’ like a movie. Once you’ve written all your frames you can play them back at your desired speed.

Now there’s a special feature of the board, that it doesn’t loose it’s content when you close the application that you used to write to it’s memory.
This way, all the frames that you write with v4 appear in the software ‘lasershow designer’ that comes with the board. You can re-edit the frames you created with v4, or save them to disc as shows, show parts or resources. These should also be playable by the Flashback device. But right now, I don’t see a way to get the graphics into ilda format out of v4 other than the workaround through the memory of the qm2000 board.

If you don’t need live content creation, it could make sense to look into the specifications of ilda show files, maybe you can create them as files out of v4 in another way. As far as I know, these showfiles are binary, though. Maybe there’s a way to import svg or piont lists into some lasershow software …

this is a video of a test made with the ld-qm2000 setup a while ago.

Something else.

There’s the lumax interface

http://www.lumax.de/

for which a node also already exists.
This usb device doesn’t have a framestore, only a doublebuffer, but as I described that is enough for most applications, if you create your content out of v4. It works pretty straighforward and is ILDA conform.

The reason I wen’t to work with the pangolin board is the higher spatial resolution (16 bit instead of 10 bit on the lumax), and better color handling.
But again, for most cases 10 bit resolution is enough.

For a tradefair show we designed a full laser show with v4, and we had to use industry standard - pangolin - in this case as well for security reasons.

eno tnks for the explination!
you see that kid on vimeo asking you which scanners did you use , thats me almost 3 years ago before i start using vvvv or knowing what ilda is!

its seems that the LD2000 node its only for the card that you use, because as you mention before, this flashback3 its only a playback unit without framestore.

The pci cards its way too expensive for “testing” im very new into lasers and i only have 1 cheap 15kpps scaner , i will try to get the lumax interface that you mention. On the video that you post on vimeo, that something that can be done with the lumax interface without any problem rigth ?

can you show me a patch example of how to do a simple geometry with the lumax node or with the ld2000 node ?

regarding ilda “clips” , i have a tracer on QuickShow to scan 1 image file, is there any other comercial solution to make a lot of frame of a video insted of using the tracer for each frame ?

please leave me here all the sites / info regarding laser because i really want to get into this , thanks again! :)

and 1 more question, a club owner its ofering me a PureLigth 4w gas laser, he dont have the “table” or the “scanners” to use this, he didt mencion the price yet, but is laying on a dirty room for more than 8 years, he claim that he was able to turn it on, the laser itself works.

My quiestion is, what hardware do i need to control this ? i mean, i can add the scanners, but i dont have blanking control, at that time its was a mecanial blanking, nowadays how does this works ?

I 'm testing live with v4 and qm2000 board, i have hard times with blanking issue and repeated lines. any help? I can plot a “kind” of teapot in 3d with VertexBuffer but the drawing is a bit too weird…and i don’t understand how to use the cornering, anchoring and blanking, any clues?

Hope to get some infos from Ld2000 SDK, i can share it if someone interested

Sorry for being offline a couple of days. Family things.

the qm2000 has it’s own framerate, that depends on the size of the frame and the scanspeed. It starts to draw the frame immediately again, when it finishes the prior one. This can lead to timing problems when v4s framerate is lower than the qm2000 framerate. You should set your mainloop to raw and all renderers to presentation interval: immediate. This way the loop waits for the ld2000 node every frame, and you should be in sync, and have no repeated lines.

multiple lines in one frame are separated by setting the first point of the new line to black.
This way the ld2000 computes the hidden (blanked) path from the end of the previous line to the beginning of the new line, and adds the necessary points.
Its in necessary to construct this blanked path to slow down the mirror before it actually arrives at the new line, because otherwise it would swing over way too far and make a jerky line, and not a straight one. for this are also the pins for beginning and end blanked and visible points.

The ld2000 does this in both vector and non-vector frames.

if you set vector frame to 1, you only need to specify the beginning and end point of a line, and the node will fill in the points in between in distances specified in the ‘point spacing visible lines’ (its an arbitray scale).

if you define lines not as vectors, you have to add all the points of the lines yourself.

with the corner flag you can define any of your points as a corner. The ld2000 adds the amount of points specified in the line corner anchor points.
the spread count of the corner pin has to have the same size as the position and color pins. unfortunately you cant specify it by indices.

thanks a lot eno!
Today I got the answer playing a bit with ld2000 node and i succesfully squared a box, and took away few lines with blanking pin, all seems to work fine now, I’m planning to find a way to have the blanking made automatically, and something like “cell shading” for 3d projection
:)

i was able to play a litle bit with the midi imputs of quickshow… i have almost all that i need but in one layer
i can switch on diferent shapes, color master / color mix / mix color r,g,b,alpha / scale x,y,z, / position x,y,z / rotate x,y,z / autorotate x,y,z / scan rate / number of points / mmm and that it… but all that connected to vvvv with midiyoke its a lot fun, the 1st thing that i made was to sync the color of the laser with the average color of 9 pipets nodes over a video

and with mouuse system global i was able to make my laser draw with vvvv

im doing that but 2.0 :P , you draw with the laser pointer, and the ilda laser mantains your draw.

i was able to play a litle bit with the midi imputs of quickshow… i have almost all that i need but in one layer
i can switch on diferent shapes, color master / color mix / mix color r,g,b,alpha / scale x,y,z, / position x,y,z / rotate x,y,z / autorotate x,y,z / scan rate / number of points / mmm and that it… but all that connected to vvvv with midiyoke its a lot fun, the 1st thing that i made was to sync the color of the laser with the average color of 9 pipets nodes over a video

and with mouuse system global i was able to make my laser draw with vvvv

im doing that but 2.0 :P , you draw with the laser pointer, and the ilda laser mantains your draw.

does anyone have any experience with the url=http://www.eelight.com/ilda-laser-control-software-usb-interface-ishow-p-42.htmlishow/url controller? cheaper compared to Lumax, and promises up to 60kpps (no idea about spatial resolution… but i’d be fine with 10bit i suppose).

as far as i can tell, there is no official SDK or anything like that, so it looks like the USB protocol would have to be reverse-engineered to make the controller work with v4… i’d be interested in doing this, by the way (no money to buy one now ;( )

which reminds me, for the tinkerers: http://hackedgadgets.com/2009/05/09/hard-drive-laser-show/ :]

btw the ilda specification can be found from the ilda website… gotta run now

ilda standard its quite easy to understand, 11 wires, ground, positive, and negative signals for:

x,y,r,g,b

and the dac interface its quite simple as well… you need a 5 chanel sound card and 5 amps, without the caps filters on the output, you cand send 16b resolution to each changel,
the software to generate the values its the hard part :(

that interface that you mention, simply, sucks. I compare that to the mamba interface and its worst than the mamba. The resolution its 8b, its slow, nothing can beat pangolin. Quickshow and the Flashback3 its the best “price-quality”. next step after this 500uss its other pangolin hardware but its more than 2000uss :(

so does anyone have experience using the Lumax interface with vvvv?
there is a https://discourse.vvvv.org/t/7153, but nothing conclusive.

i ask because i am looking for a USB-ILDA-interface, so the PCI card that works with the Ld2000 node is out of the question. or is there a USB controller that is compatible with Ld2000?