Jeffrey Nelson just let me know about an awesome project that he put together: LaserShark! Instead of using OpenLase with the hacky sound card output, he put together a proper open DAC board based around an LPC1343 Cortex-M3 microcontroller. I haven’t had a chance to see it in action yet, but considering that the systems I’ve seen so far either use proprietary DACs (that tend to suck) or sound card DACs (with all their problems), I think this is easily the best DAC solution for using OpenLase today.

He also suggested, quite rightly, that moving OpenLase to GitHub will make it easier for others to contribute and that the wiki feature should help put together some reasonable documentation. Thus, I’ve copied the git repo over to GitHub. I haven’t started populating the documentation yet (and knowing my rather unpredictable schedule and project interest I have no idea when I’ll get around to doing so), but if you want to help out, head over to the wiki! Of course, I’ll also gladly take pull requests from anyone hacking on the code

I apologize for taking this long to post this! I’ve been busy non-stop since 27c3 and never got a chance to get around to it. Finally, though, here it is: the description of the Mark 1 laser projector that I use with OpenLase.

But wait, there’s more! If you don’t have the hardware and don’t want to build it, or you want to try out OpenLase, or you want to be able to mess around with it on the go, you can now do that. There’s a new OpenGL-based simulator in the OpenLase tree. It works off of the JACK data (so you still need JACK) and it tries to simulate the dynamics of my laser scanner, including brightness effects and some of the physical limitations of the galvos. Here’s a comparison of the simulator vs. the real thing:

I’m aware that documentation on the software is still sorely lacking. Please bear with me while I get my act together and write that up

Update: see this post for hardware info and also a new GL laser simulator for those without hardware.

First of all, as I’m sure everyone knows by now, I’ve been working on hacking the Kinect and writing open drivers for it. There’s a website for the community and a Git repo with the code, and it’s working fairly nicely by now.

With that out of the way, here’s a project that I’ve been working on on-and-off for the past year or so. I’ve been interested in laser scanning and DIY laser projectors, but I couldn’t find any good open source software to drive them. Specifically, I was interested in the realtime aspect: rendering and showing dynamically generated images and responding to events, not just making and preprocessing laser shows. So I set out to write my own set of software to do real-time rendering. This was the result:

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