Interactive lasers

(WIKI IN PROGRESS)

Goals

The main idea is to add interactivity to "leisure" lasers. i.e with a gamepad one can play to old style vector games on city buildings.

Different levels of complexity are possible. Commercial lasers uses ilda files/connections to draw whatever you want, but you can build your own, see hardware section.

• The very fast and easy plan is to switch ilda scenes according to some inputs. You can use already made ilda files (see download section) in a SDcard plugged inside the laser fixture and use DMX protocol to switch. DMX usb cards are cheap, usually we use enttec ones. DMX controlled lasers are cheaper than
• If the plan is too draw live, it depends on the laser fixture DIY or commercial. Lot of possibilities depending on the number of colors, from using an arduino, a 5.1 USB soundcard upt to use commercially (opensource) cards using the standarts ilda connect ports.

Hardware

Obviously there is DIY Lasers and commercial ones and there is a bunch of cards integrating some DACs to talk to the laser fixture.
A great forum for bootstrap your project is laser freak that comes in different langages.

We play with two different setups :

• a green DIY laser made at la Blackboxe with a lasershark USB DAC card.
• an ilda DB25 ports RGB commercial laser for clubs with an Etherdream USB DAC card. Obviously is much more expensive but has some great advantage : the ether dream is directly tcp/IP controlled, so you can imagine very cool projects with very easy setup and of course the programming langage you prefer.

Ether dream dac