Topic: Dummy needing help please

[Tallboy2]

Hi
I know nothing at all about lasers. I bought one for a mobile disco. A KAM laserscan 1000 3d v2
I want to make it project text using a pc. I believe I need a DAC that talks to the Laser and pc
and some software. Oh and a cable.
I checked out the cost of these DACs and that's why I'm here to see if it's in my capabilities to build one.
Can anyone help (explaining as as though I were a 2 year old)
Thank you

[James]

You can build a DAC from a 5.1 (6 channel) or 7.1 (8 channel) sound device.

You need to know how to solder pretty well.

I sell a kit that you will need. The kit is $40 plus shipping.

Look for the USB SND8. This is a good 8 channel USB sound device.

You need to tack solder 6 wires onto the back of the sound device PC board.

Then you need to build the kit.

Once you build the kit you need to hook up the sound device and test it and tune it so that it will work with an ILDA controlled projector.

A laser projector with an ILDA port is controlled by a set of 5 analog voltages.

X, Y, red, green, blue.

X and Y control the position of the beam and red green and blue control the color.

LaserBoy makes wave files with 6 channels, that contain those control signals.

So you can make your show material in LaserBoy and convert that into a 6 channel wave that, when played through the sound card DAC, will produce the analog voltages necessary to display your show on the laser projector.

The LaserBoy software is free.

[Tallboy2]

Thank you very much james sounds fantastic
So basically 40 dollars plus shipping is what it will cost me?
Is the kit straight forward to build?
I can get someone else to solder the wires onto the board if I am dubious about that.
And the software is easy to use?
Sorry for all the questions
I know nothing about this
I thought I could just plug the laser in to my pc find a driver and off we go! But I know now there's more to it than that

[James]

One of the first things you should know is that laser art on a computer is in vector format.

It's like a CAD drawing and nothing like a typical PC picture format.

Think of a connect-the-dots drawing. This is the path that the scanners will move the laser beam in X and Y.

So you need to make art in vector format (an ILDA file). LaserBoy lets you draw in 3D color vector.

You can open a bitmap picture file (BMP) into the background of LaserBoy and trace vectors over it.

You can also render math figures with your own values (like Spirograph) and render text in a variety of included fonts.

You can create animation effects on individual frames and apply effects to animations.

Then you save that as a LaserBoy formatted, optimized wave file and play it with Spider Player (in Windows) through the sound card DAC.