I’ve been working with lasers in Touch for a few years now to great results. Upon booting up my project in the 2025 experimental build, I was pretty disappointed to see my patterns completely botched. Even after transitioning my laser and helios DAC chops to the new ones (laser and laser device), messing with settings, trying the new ID parameters and lascorner stuff, nothing seems to get patterns even close to looking like how they used to except changing the queue time from .1 to .5+. That doesn’t even help with some patterns though as some don’t seem to display at all.
I even made a new fresh project with just a simple circle with POPs and that will be super flickery and laggy unless the queue time is above 0.5.
I wish I could test this with other DACs, but I unfortunately only have access to two Helios (same thing on both of those).
Any ideas on such a drastic difference in these outcomes between these two versions? The 2023 build I had been using was 2023.12120.
For now, I can at least use my main project on 2025 with pops for visuals, then still run the 2023 build simultaneously with my laser stuff.
Hi @conradhellman.art, sorry this slipped through the cracks, we can look at it now. Do you have the original 2023 project file we could use to check behavior in 2023 and then load it into 2025 ourselves to compare? If you do not want to share it publicly you can email it to support.
You’ll see in the video it’s not a project specific issue, I can recreate it with just a few nodes in a fresh file. It definitely feels very specific to the Helios hardware. I have no doubt there are significant improvements from the rewrite on other DACs, or maybe even the laser type I have is part of the issue?
I’d be happy to reply with any other info I can gather for you. Not sure what that would be though.
The hardware is 2x Helios Laser DAC + Unity Raw 3 (The problem is identical on both pairs) plugged into a USB 3.2 port, though I don’t think they use any additional speed past 2.0 as I get the same results even sending it through a USB 2.0 speed Ethernet to USB converter.
I will test that as soon as I can this weekend! I can’t say I’ve messed with that one since I’ve always just kept it synced with the maximum of my lasers (30,000).
Was able to look into that suggestion today. See the video below for the results.
I did not notice any improvements with different output rates. Once you get really low it gets worse, of course. I did notice some interesting behavior with the queue time though (see second half of video). In 2023, I would notice a smooth decrease in artifacts/errors when I raise the queue time, but in this case there is the flickery effect until exactly .45 queue time. .44 queue time flickery, .45 queue time is perfect beam.
Maybe that gives some info onto what the issue might be? I can do some more testing - let me know what specifically you’d want to see!
I tested and was able to reproduce. The problem is that older devices and firmware do not support the full/extended frames that we switched to in 2025.30000. I will fix it so that it falls back to the small frames (ie. with 8-bit color and no user channels) when the device does not support it.
Good to hear! For my own info - is that a problem with the Helios, period? And with this in mind what exactly would I be missing out on by continuing to use the Helios instead of a better DAC with these new improvements? Less precise color? Something with the corner point controls?
Extended frames are 16-bit color, so more precision and more total colors (281 trillion vs 16 million), basically. Additionally, extended frames support user fields which can expose custom functionality, or additional colors like yellow or cyan, depending on configuration.
For comparison: all EtherDream devices support 16-bit color so that is one difference between them.
The issue will be fixed in the next experimental we release: 2025.31328+. As mentioned earlier, devices that do not support full/extended frames will instead automatically fallback to use the older 8-bit frames (which also means no user channels). Thanks for the report.
