Oh boy!
There is a lot to cover here...
Scanner amps and scanners are uaually closed loop devices. They need each other and are tuned together as a system.
The scanners are fixed coils in the stator and a magnetic shaft with no torsion spring in the rotor.
If the coils are charged one way the rotor will want to rotate in that direction. If the polarity of the juice to the coils is revered, it will want to rotate the other way.
Meanwhile, the rotor has a position sensor on it that feeds back to the amp.
So, the way it works in general is that you apply some voltage (from negative to positive relative to ground) to the input of the amp and the amp juices up the coils to accelerate the rotor to the position that corresponds to the input voltage. As the rotor is approaching that position the amp juices the coils in the opposite direction to decelerate the rotor to stop on the position.
Or to put it another way, the coils are only energized as long as the rotor is not in the position indicated by the input to the scanner amp.
So, it is possible to use a wave file to store and play a signal that moves the scanners around in a way that does not exceed the maximum rotational speed of the galvos.
ILDA is the International Laser Display Association, also a file format, or rather a set of formats that are stored in *.ild files.
It is a very brief and no-frills binary list of frames; each frame being a header and a set of consecutive elements of either 2D, 3D vertices or RGB colors for a palette or a combination of vertices and RGB values.
LaserBoy knows how to read and write all flavors of ILDA, plus DXF, waves and plain text tables. Once that data is loaded in LaserBoy it can be saved as a LaserBoy Formatted Wave.
If you look in the [Tab] menu, you will see a set of parameters; some of which are used to "optimize" wave output.
Optimization is all about controlling the timing of raw vector art such that it will work properly and look good on your scanners.
LaserBoy Formatted Waves can be opened back into LaserBoy with all of the end of frame and repeated frame information intact.
Since the waves are written according to the "legal" spec, they can be opened and played by any wave app that recognizes multi-channel waves.
By default LB waves are 6 channels:
X
Y
red
green
blue
other
Where other is your choice of RGB mixtures or possibly Z (3D)
It is worth noting that a standard sound device is almost always capacitor decoupled and thus cannot produce a DC coupled control signal.
That is why one needs to modify the sound card a bit and add a "Correction Amp".
http://laserboy.org/forum/index.php?topic=561.0James.
