This area of LaserBoy is different than the rest. This menu deals with LaserBoy wave files that are on the disk. Nothing in this menu will effect the color vector art that is currently loaded into LaserBoy memory.
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Item 1 is a set of on-off switches that control the way LaserBoy will show you the wave information on the screen.
1 vertices
2 blanking
3 realtime
4 inverted
5 clear screen
6 loop
1 and 2 are pretty self explanatory. If 3 is set on, then the wave will display as nearly to real time as possible. That is, it should play in the screen for exactly the same time is plays as a wave out the sound card.
4 needs to be set if you invert your waves. If you use the 6 or 8 channel USB DAC and a LaserBoy Correction Amp, YOU DO! So, if you want to play the wave back on the screen and see it as positive information, you need to set 4 to re-invert your inverted wave data.
5 is a really neat effect! You can choose not to wipe the screen between each frame. This causes all of the drawn information to pile up into one bitmap on the screen! For certain things, this is very useful. You can see exactly every place that the laser will draw all in one image.
6 causes the playback of a wave to loop repeatedly.
All of these settings pertain to wave option 3, show LaserBoy wave on screen.
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Item 2 opens a wave, looks at the header and tell you what it sees. This will display all of the information that might be found in a wave header that might have been put there by LaserBoy or another application that knows how to write to the LaserBoy wave file format or one of its ancestors. There are several generations of LaserBoy wave file header information. This will tell you the LaserBoy wave header version as well.
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Item 3 asks for a LaserBoy wave file name and, if it opens successfully, displays it on the screen according to the settings specified in menu item 1 above.
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Item 4 allows you to setup a list of integer values that may be applied to a wave file to shift the sample (time) relationships between the channels for color mod to galvo time alignment.
The first number it asks for is a sample offset for both X and Y together. There is no logical reason to split time between your galvos! If you set this to a positive number, like 7, you are saying that you want the X & Y samples to arrive 7 samples sooner in time. This is about right for my PCAOM system. Once you have set any part of the list, you can escape out of that settings mode and the rest of the settings will be whatever they were. You might notice that the offsets that actually get written into the wave data and stored in the header are always mathematically relative to what you entered, but negative. That's because it made sense to me to be able to delay the signal, but not push it forward into the future!
You can just as easily set X & Y offsets to zero and used negative integers to delay the individual red, green, blue, etc. signals relative to X & Y.
Once you have the signal offset list set up the way you want it, you can apply it to an LaserBoy wave on your hard drive.
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Item 5 asks you to name a LaserBoy wave file to open and apply the channel offsets that you chose above in item 4.
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Item 6 asks you to name a LaserBoy wave file to open, but all it does is writs the offset list into the wave header. The channel offsets are NOT applied to the wave data. This makes it possible to work with wave recordings that have time offsets that you don't know.
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Item 7 asks you to name a LaserBoy wave file to open and globally inverts all of the data. That is, it flips the sign of every 16 bit integer in every channel throughout the whole wave. It also stores the fact that the wave has been polarity inverted in the header. Some sound card DACs do not need the external correction amp and some sound cards are inherently inverters, themselves. The idea of a global wave polarity is to compensate for either situation. Either your DAC is an inverter or it is not! The USB + LaserBoy Amp is an inverter. The Echo Layla 24/96 is not.
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Item 8 lets you invert information on a per signal (channel) basis. This means that you can go into a wave that is already rendered and flip just the X or the Y or invert the TTL signal on the red channel or whatever! A set of signal IDs is stored in the wave header. The absolute values of these numbers identify the signals in each channel of the wave. If that number is positive the signal is positive, if that number is negative, the signal has been individually inverted relative to the rest of the signals. If a signal has been inverted, the letters "neg" appear in the "sig" column of the signal name list whenever LaserBoy displays this wave's header information.
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Items 9 & 0 are a primitive start to working with imported ADAT wave information. When transcribing digital LightPipe information from an ADAT machine playing a tape, into the Echo Layla 24/96, it is most reasonable to only record those tracks that contain information! So it makes sense to set up a stereo (2 channel) wave to save the X & Y information and a mono wave for each of the color signals that might be there. If there is also stereo audio, it should be transcribed into its own stereo wave for storage on the hard drive. Since LaserBoy has nothing to do with the ADAT tape to hard drive transcription process, it needs to know how you want to reconstruct the individual wave recording together into what seem more like a multi channel LaserBoy wave.
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Item a asks you to name a LaserBoy wave file to open, then it asks for the name of a stereo audio wave to open. If both waves open successfully, then they are merged together into an 8 channel LaserBoy wave file! This is the current way you join the concepts of laser signals and stereo audio (music) together into the same multi channel wave.
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Hopefully, you should see a lot of changes, additions and improvements to this menu in the near future. This is where I am concentrating a lot of my development effort!
These items kind-of catch me up in software to where I am with the hardware... ready to rock-n-roll with an 8 channel USB DAC!
James.
