Re: R: R: Vector games on Laser show hardware

Pangolin is something of the 'gold standard' when it comes to USB based DAC hardare/software for lasers. In particular they also have (had?) a programming API that basically lets an app deal with things at a 'vector' level and their API handles the 'black magic' part of converting it to points for display by the laser.

There was a bit of a brouhaha a while back when apparently somebody hacked up a little intermediate driver that would talk to the Pangolin drivers and just use the 5 channels of a USB audio adapter (that was modified to have single ended DC outputs instead of AC coupling) to get ~90% of the performance for like 1% of the cost.

The audio DAC setup still seems to be a favorite of the hobby-laser crowd, although the freeware software really seems to be lacking compared to the commercial stuff (Pangolin Laser Designer 2000 in particular).

As an "oh by the way", you can drive lasers with essentially a "continuous" waveform (not just 'points'). (A continuous function really just being an 'infinite' collection of discrete points. ;-) Just for laughs a couple summers ago I used an ATXmega32A4 (with two built in 12 bit DACs) and a software implementation of Bresenham's line algorithm to draw stuff. It worked great (and since it was relatively slow there was no issue with overshoot/undershoot on the beam), but even with a 32MHz AVR you just don't get much vector time to render shapes by doing that.

-Clay

----- Original Message -----
From: "Andrew Welburn" <andy@andysarcade.net>
To: vectorlist@vectorlist.org
Sent: Thursday, December 22, 2011 11:15:56 AM
Subject: Re: R: R: VECTOR: Vector games on Laser show hardware

http://www.pangolin.com/LD2000/LD2000_Siggraph.htm

They're not cheap, but they appear to look great compared to some older mono
laser systems i've seen...

I realise that this system is undoubtedly running from MAME and not from a
real pcb... but i would hope it could be fudged to play from the real thing
:)

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Received on Fri Dec 23 19:57:21 2011