Topic: First Light!

[Agent C]

Still alive, just been busy lately, and had to make another scouting trip up to Cleveland.

First light on Laser Agent tonight, and I wanted to show off my text rendering since I just figured out how to draw quad_to beziers from the glyph based fonts.  The text Laser Wizard is a tribute to Tim, my laser mentor back in the day. 

The image was scanned by my old MediaLas Catweazels.  They were being driven too hard, but I had to crank the size up to get a decent pic with phone cam.  Rest of the components in the system were USB 5.1 soundcard, Audiolase correction amp, 405nm diode, and flex2 driver.  I'll retune the scanners and connect the diode modulation tomorrow.  Just wanted to share the first light pics.

~C

[James]

OMG!

You're one-of-us now! 

You've actually generated your own intelligent laser signals!

It's all down hill from here, man!  :

You were in Cleveland and you didn't come and see me! 

I'm crushed.

Seriously... I need to catch up with you about what audio lib you are using and if you really can get that USB sound card to work in Mac OSX.... Then we REALLY need to get it up in Linux!

Linux would be the perfect OS for making a complete laser projection appliance.

James. 

[Agent C]

Yeah next trip out there I'll come visit.  I was in the lab the whole time and I didn't rent a car since I was walking distance to Case.

I have an Ubuntu install on a little cube computer that I was going to use for a HTPC, but I might as well try to run my laser soft on it.  It will make a good linux test platform.  I'll let you know how it goes.  I really need to get my knock off 6800s running, but I'm afraid one of the scanners got smoked by a faulty psu.

The first picture was a shot of my oscope, btw.

[Fanny Pack]

I was wondering about that first picture.  I was thinking that you had some awesome scanners or something!

Are you the guy doing the Java laser stuff?  I was just looking at some sound APIs last night and noticed a java library for sound cards and I thought that was interesting.

[BlinkenLights]

yep thats the Java guy....

This is dangerous...


We have a
C++ Coder (historically known for being all about math, logic, and the internals of what a program really does)
.Net coder ( known for being user oriented and focused on interface and usability)
Java Coder (known for living in their ow little world but still somehow still getting things done)

And me (know for my kick ass ideas)

ALL IN THE SAME THREAD...

[James]

Yes!

And we're als so modest too. Aren't we? 

James. 

[Absolom]

Of course.  I remember James' PL Avatar "I am great!!!"  lol

[BlinkenLights]

James did not make that actually..
A fan did

[James]

Well.... yeah....

But you have to know the story of where that came from.

Soferone of the PL drew that to make fun of me!

I liked it so much I made a frame of it that gets distributed with LaserBoy!

James.  

[Absolom]

I know, but I loved how you irratated them by embracing it.

[Agent C]

Yep I'm the Java guy, and that own little world comment isn't too far off the mark.   

I'm using JSYN for the sound library, which appears to be the best performing and has multichannel support.  As I mentioned in the previous Laser Agent thread, it has a platform specific c library that interfaces with the appropriate OS sound API, like Core Audio in my case, and then the java functions make calls to that library.  The vertex to signal section of the code utilizes an OpenGL buffer.  I read the points and stick them into a queue for the sound card channel.  I should be able to swap out the signal generation for non sound based DACs like the EzAudDac without too much trouble.

I'm also obsessed with real time point generation - I'll give you an example.  Let's say I write a little function that generates a circle with a for loop, cos t for the x, sin t for the y.  Now let's say I want something more organic.  I can introduce a perlin noise component at each point, then step through that noise field over time.  Now my circle/time tunnel becomes an rippling energy ring or whatever.  Lasergraph DSP is the only other platform I know of that gives me access to that level of effect generation.  I'm sure if Bill B were on here he'd be screaming about how P******* has been doing that for years, but I doubt it.  The only downside is that I don't think I can easily share my creations in an ilda file.

~C

[Fanny Pack]

Why aren't you able to share your stuff as an ILDA file?  I think that as long as you can save the points that you generate and they are equidistant in time then you should be able to make an ILDA file out of them.  Each frame could be a constant 1000 points or whatever and you would just keep generating 1000 point frames until you ran out of points.  At one time I was working on an abstract generator and that was the approach I was taking. 

[James]

You could save all of your DAC signal data and stick a header on it and call it a wave!

BTW Not all multi-channel waves with laser signals in them need to be called LaserBoy waves.

If I make a transcription of an old ADAT show and turn that into a multi-channel wave, it will play just fine through a sound card DAC. But, it would have none of the LaserBoy header info or LSB sub-codes.

I've done it!

James. 

[Agent C]

Well I suppose I could but the idea is that these patterns can be calculated from now until the end of time, and they will be different each time.  Then if I build in hooks to modulate the amplitude of the noise via knob or slider....

Here's another thing popping around in my head:

If I write 1000 updates at a time into a buffer that drains at 44100 samples per sec, I'm generating a new iteration of the ring 43 times a second.  1000 points x 43 fr/sec * 60 sec * 2 mins ~ 2.5 mil points in the ilda file.  At that point I think a wav is appropriate.  And guess what - the sound engine has a non-realtime setting where it will write out a wav - works done!

Don't get me wrong, I want to be able to share stuff, and I'm not on a quest to rewrite ilda or create a new file format.  In all likelihood I will pick everybody's brains like a zombie until I learn how to read and write ilda.  The few examples I can think of like a laser clock (laser beam wristwatch, anyone) or random based abstracts that you stare at for 10 minutes at a time are probably the exception and not the rule.

~C

[James]

I guess there are three, no wait... four! different ideas here:

1. Live laser show, manipulated in real time by a human.

2. An arithmetic generator that has randomness built into it, such that it puts out a different show every time.

3. A perfect recording of a show that will be exactly the same every time you play it.

4. A set of data that accurately represent the colored vectors in frames, in order, but with no relationship to time

These things all have merit!

Nobody expects The Spanish Inquisition!!!

James.