Right know I’m working on an audiovisual performance which will combine the projections of a beamer and a laser. Technically I’m almost done, the only thing I’m somehow unable to solve is to influence the color and intensity of the laser projection.
I’m using a Helios Laser DAC and Laserworld DS-1000RGB 1W laser which is capable of analog modulation to accomplish all of this. As far as I understood the Helios DAC CHOP in TouchDesigner it should be possible to control color scale and intensity from there. However, these controls doesn’t have the intended impact on the physical projection. To make this more clear, I attached screenshots of the patch so that it’s possible to see what the laser should actually give out.
So in my example I’m applying color to the rotating banana by the aid of Point SOP which turns it all the way red. In the two screenshots you see that the color scales in the Laser CHOP and the Helios DAC CHOP are fully scaled to ‘1’ and the intensity in the Helios DAC CHOP is also all the way up to ‘1’. The actual output of the laser looks more like a magenta, in fact there’s a thicker blue line staying in the background and a thinner magenta line on top of that. If choose other colors like a plain green or blue the output only changes in slightly different blue nuances.
Shouldn’t the output be a pure red? Or am I missing something here? To further confirm that the issue isn’t caused by a faulty ILDA cable or the laser itself, I tested the adjustment of colors and intensity via DMX and Ethernet ─ all working fine.
I would really appreciate if somebody could help me out on this as I actually don’t want to spend more money to get the Ether Dream instead…
I just bought a Helios DAC a few month ago but I haven’t noticed this issue in TouchDesigner, I have yet to run more test as my laser projector is still under development, I could try in a few days with a working unit.
Have you tried to measure the output pins of the ILDA output of the Helios DAC with a multimeter?
If you get 5 Volts on the Red pin and 0V on green and blue then the error must come from your laser projector…
I have run some test with my HELIOS regarding the Intensity Scaling and this feature for sure is broken, here is my post about it, still waiting for a fix…
Thanks for your reply. Unfortunately I don’t have a multimeter at home, maybe I’ll look out to borrow one from a friend the next days. How could the error be caused by my laser if intensity and color scaling is working just fine over DMX and Ethernet? Are we talking about the pin assignment?
I was commenting on a YouTube video by Visualesque and his Helios DAC seems to work:
So I just did some measurements with a multimeter and it is exactly as you’ve already assumed @Dorian: I get 5V on the red and 0V on the green and blue pins.
I also had a talk to the support of Laserworld and they confirmed that these values are exactly what the laser would need in order to display only red color. So I’m kind of confused right now…
I swapped the ILDA cable just to make sure that the issue isn’t caused by a wrong/faulty one, but this doesn’t make any difference. The technical support of Laserworld also suggested to use an ILDA cable that I don’t need anymore and to cut it in between in order to measure the conducters while the Helios DAC and the laser is connected.
hello everyone
exactly the same problem on my side no matching color and a very poor brightness
im a bit upset because with madlaser the brightness is ok and still the issue with colors
wondering if it a true affordable solution considering all the trouble?
I think above describes a hardware issue while on your side it more sounds like an issue with your TouchDesigner project?
Can you share more details on your issue including TouchDesigner build as well as Hardware setup?
What build are you using? In the latest official build, 2023.11290, we addressed some issues with Helios intensity scaling so it would be good to know if you’re still experiencing issues. I also recommend using the Laser Device CHOP now as opposed to the Helios Dac CHOP as the former is deprecated in the latest official.
Hey there, I just wanted to confirm @snaut statement above - after quite a lot of troubleshooting I found out that the ILDA board of my laser was defected. The Helios Laser DAC was working exactly as it should and so did TouchDesigner.
Unfortunately Laserworld was not able to repair the board and didn’t even had a replacement one…
