Beatline.xyz

02/11/2024

No two laser shows should be the same. That is just lazy.

For the next event the client wants high impact and yet minimal installation time.

So I am building a compact cluster of 4 Laser Cubes. Two 2.5 Watt Pro and two 7.5 Wall Ultra. Each laser is equipped with an expander lens so we cover 360 degrees while maintaining graphics integrity. It will hang smack bang in the middle of the dance floor.

The cluster has a Gigabit TP-Link Omada router/DHCP server. This keeps the workload on the Cubes to a minimum.

The cluster only needs power and a ethernet cable back to the laptop. Installation is a matter of bringing this pre-built cluster on site, hang it and plug it in.

A black sheet of core flute is mounted underneath to hide all the clutter.

01/11/2024

We had a lot of fun in Auckland, New Zealand on Halloween night. A friend here provides this amazing show every year and this time I was honored to provide the lasers.

Such a wholesome happy neighborhood event!

A friend allowed me to provide the lasers to his annual Halloween show. It was a success with over a thousand people visiting and enjoying a fun evening.Betw...

26/10/2024

I made this 3 track Halloween show for a friend using LaserOS. Now pray for good weather. He creates the most epic shows in Auckland, New Zealand.

This video shows the test setup for an upcoming Halloween show in Auckland New Zealand.Two 2.5 watt Lasercube Pro' for the beamsOne 7.5 watt Lasercube Ultra ...

25/10/2024

🔥 Laser Tough, Ultra Reflective! 🔥

Check out the results of our latest burn test with a 7.5 watt Lasercube Ultra! ⚡️

👉 Left: Regular metallic mirror—burned through in just 2 seconds.
👉 Right: Our cutting-edge nano material—ZERO DAMAGE even after 5 seconds under the same laser!

Not only does the nano material withstand high-powered lasers, but it also weighs less and much more reflective, giving off sharper and brighter reflections. ✨💎 The proof is in the brightness and durability!

Ready for more intense, long-lasting laser effects? Nano material is the future! 🌟

23/10/2024

Here is a early prototype of the Medusa mirror pinned onto some hologram netting. The mirror is so light, it won't even cause it to sag.

This opens up all kinds of new rear projections on hologram netting. Bear in mind, none of the beams reach the audience as the beams go almost perpendicular to the background surface.

22/10/2024

Here is a video playing Apart from Overwerk on LaserOS via my new nano Medusa mirror. In this case a 7.5 Watt Lasercube Ultra is used.

This mirror is bright and weighs next to nothing. I think I finally have found the material I needed. What makes this extra cool is that the final product can be shipped in a flat envelope.

Will power is almost enough to keep the 3 gram mirror stuck on the ceiling, or use a small piece of tape.

Once again, the Medusa mirror brings organic surround beam effects into venues with low ceilings or places where smoke or haze is not an option. Another added advantage is that your galvo doesn't need to work so hard. In fact, the smaller the projection, the bigger the spread on the ceiling becomes.

Keep an eye out for updates. I think this mirror will make it to production.

22/10/2024

After moving to new premises with more space I finally found time to work on the Medusa Mirror.

So far the only cone shaped mirror capable to take a high power beam was a solid hunk of polished aluminum. Unfortunately that is very expensive, hard to manufacture, stupid heavy and relatively poor reflectivity.

However, I have found a nano material that has an extremely high reflectivity, can be shaped and weighs next to nothing.

Here is a picture of a piece of nano mirror against a standard silvered mirror. Note how much brighter the reflection is!

16/08/2024

And here it is. A demo program that uses the GPU to generate a 2D gradient which is then read asynchronously from the GPU and used to generate laser data which is then send to the Helios Laser DAC.

Even if you don't have a Helios Laser DAC you can still generate 2
d gradients and save them to a local image file.

Probably more useful is the fact that the program also saves the scan animation in ILD format.

The animation assumes a 30000pps signal, 60fps and a duration of 4 seconds.

Two example files here:
https://beatline.xyz/stuff/gradient/beatline_grad_1.ild
https://beatline.xyz/stuff/gradient/beatline_grad_2.ild

Editor to create amazing 2D gradients. The program sends a scanline to a Helios Laser DAC if you have one.

14/08/2024

2D Gradient Generator. Another piece of the puzzle. I want 2D gradients with rich colors that I can animate in real-time.

You place 2D color stops just like color stops on a regular linear Gradient. The distance for every pixel to every color stop defines the ratio of how much of that color is used.

Insanely intense compute wise. Just imagine on a single 4096 x 4096 bitmap. That is 16.7 million times that a distance is calculated to every 2D color stop. Let's say 10 color stops. That is 167 million distance calculations and if you do that with an animation at 60 fps... that is ...10 BILLION distance calculations per second. Insanity.

Yeah, that would be far too slow in JavaScript. But this is what GPU's are good at. I wrote a special shader program for this purpose.

Here a demo you can play with.

By default the program uses 512 x 512 pixels for the gradient regardless of what it is displayed at.

When you "Save to Files" you get 512x512 and screen resolution. The project data is saved as well, so you can continue work on gradient projects later.

You can force the app to other base resolutions via the URL
https://beatline.xyz/stuff/gradient/?width=5&height=5

Here the height and width are a mere 5 x 5 pixels but you will be surprised at the fidelity.

Why is all this relevant? Well, imagine a laser doing a horizontal scan line... Starts at the top and slowly moves down, the colors change as line slices are taken from the color gradient.

Pushing color around is just more fun.

Runs on mobile and desktop. Apple? I don't know and don't care.
Have fun.

https://beatline.xyz/stuff/gradient/

10/08/2024

Trying different timeline GUI solutions.

08/08/2024

More tech post I am afraid. I really need to get a Blog installed on my web-site soon.

Still working on animated 2D gradients realizing that video and images are also excellent as a 2D color source.

Although JavaScript is fast these days, it is much faster to let the graphics chip handle this so as a test I wrote a shader to produce a 4 color gradient. The color distribution can be controlled and animated fast.

You can try it here and even improve it if you like.
https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4cjcW3

(If the stupid Facebook redirect let's you off their stinking site)

07/08/2024

Three fun technology test pages to play with. Besides evaluating old code for use in the Beam Editor I am also designing an elaborate animated color gradient editor.

Pages:

Smooth: https://beatline.xyz/stuff/smooth/
On this page some mathematics that I think can be used for driving galvos to higher performance. It calculates acceleration and deceleration to achieve a determined speed for every corner in the polyline while traversing the line segment in a determined time.

Lightning: https://beatline.xyz/stuff/lightning/
The beam editor will have many parametric beam generators and capabilities can grow over time. One cool plugin could be a lightning generator. You can move the start and end point on the page using your mouse.

GradientBlob: https://beatline.xyz/stuff/gradientblob/
Lasers are about rich color. So why do so many laser programs use standard Color Pickers. At first I wanted color gradient editors but they are too limited as well. I want 2D gradients. Like a painters palette mix and match and move organic color swatches around.

What's more, all the parameters must be animatable in real-time. Possibly this GradientBlob is the answer. It can also be used for scene coloring where every beam coordinate is mapped to the 2D color gradient. The blob geometry is made from splines and can also be animated. Come to think of it, it would make an interesting beam generator as well.

27/07/2024

Beatline now has a complete separation between content and laser devices. What this means is that if you design a beam to cover 16 beats in music, that beam will run on time in sync on any laser.

Rather than timing in milliseconds, I decided that the unit of time in the Beam editor is a bar like used in music notation. Of course once you set your BPM and Beats per Bar you can calculate milliseconds but it's such a useless unit.

For fun I ran a song through a bpm analyzer and then ran the Beam Editor via the Helios Laser DAC set at the same BPM. It looked really sharp timing wise all the way though the song.

Note how the shape gradually get's more points as it get's bigger.

I make sure the laser simulator behaves as a real DAC would. I measure PPS but also fps based on when the drawing of content is repeated. You can see bottle necks very easily thanks to the simulator.

If you want to export data to ILDA you can specify the PPS of the target laser on which you want to play it and the fps so that the animation runs at the correct speed.

I can't wait to publish the software but it is not good enough for testing and the questions would just slow me down. I learned a lot from being able to tweak so many parameters but it is also very easy to kill your driver or galvo by entering bad parameters.

If you want to help, Please feel free to repost this on other forums.

22/07/2024

The Beatline beam editor is coming along nicely. As a user you can add input sources and output sources (Such as the laser simulator shown here or the Helios Laser DAC)

You can map what resources are shown on which output device.

For example, grab an ILDA file. Put it in the top right corner and fill the rest with another resource from a SVG file.

18/07/2024

From a web page straight to your laser! Over the past week, I've been working on a JavaScript driver that lets you send point data from a web browser via USB to the Helios Laser DAC and no software needs to be installed.

Although our Beatline software under development runs on a web browser, I want to see the results live on the laser as I edit. This is now possible. Connection is as simple as opening the web page, giving the page permission to talk to your Helios Laser DAC's and that's it!

Just like the Helios Laser DAC is open source, I made my code open source as well. https://github.com/dinther/helios_dac

If you have a Helios Laser DAC, head on over to the above link because there is a live demo page. If you don't own one already, I recommend you grab one now while they are still in stock. BitLasers published a long list of laser software that works with their Helios Laser DAC and soon Beatline will be among them. Gitle is offering a 5% discount via this affiliate link: https://bitlasers.com/?coupon=beatline

27/05/2024

While I am waiting for new mirror materials among which a solid aluminium mirror made with a CNC machine, I am working on the Beatline beam creator software.

Here are the beginnings of the timeline editor for the free beatline beam creator software.

As I argued before, timing animation to music is better done though musical time units.

The user can specify "beats per measure" and "divisions per beat". This defines how the ruler is drawn. In the picture 4 measures (bars), each with 4 beats and each beat with 4 divisions. This gives a total of 16 divisions per measure. User can zoom in and out of course.

The segments between two nodes (the little circles) can be provided with a easing which defines how the value changes from one node value to the next. In addition to 32 standard animation easings there will also be rythm specific easings such as Tresillo, Clave, Hemiola etc etc.

At 120 BPM each beat is 500 ms and each division is 125ms
Animation nodes snap to the divisions. You can pick timing in between but I can not imagine you'd ever want to, provided the timeline runs perfectly in sync with the music.

Every property for every dynamic beam generator can be animated using this time line. Similar to how animations are done in Blender.

I post this to invite comments and feedback on the timeline aspect.

10/05/2024

The Beatline software under development will consist of two parts. One part will be the beam designer and be released first. It will largely be a free browser based program. No accounts required. In fact you will be able to copy the site and run the whole thing on your own computer.

The other part is the beam player. This C program will run on a Single Board Computer maybe even a micro controller and for now interface with the Helios Laser DAC.

Here is a small example. I am using a spiral grid that uses video as a color source. You can also use images, screen capture or we**am as a color source. I am still struggling with the best UI presentation.
In the browser you can export the data as an ILD file. In the windows beatline software you will be able to preview the results live on the laser.

Other rasters will be grid and line patterns. Those will enable you to render complex text without flickering issues. Double up on lasers and draw the lines interlaced.

The software is a long way from being finished. I believe it's time the doors to create content for show lasers are thrown open wide.
Rental software is 🤮

06/05/2024

Beatline premiere at the Urge Grunt Party in Auckland New Zealand. 4 LaserOS lasers, a hologram screen and the debut of our first Medusa Mirror.

Being a premiere, the setup took an insane amount of time. Shout out to the lighting guy. A man with passion who made me look good. I owe you a beer buddy.

That was one hell of a party that simply refused to slow down. Everyone stayed untill the music stopped.

Can we come to your event next?

30/04/2024

I am starting to build up quite a collection of amazing difrection gratings from LaserOS. I needed somewhere to store them safely without any risk of damage so I designed this 3D printable case.

Grab the stl and CAD files here if you want to print one yourself.
https://www.printables.com/model/862561-lasercube-lens-case

21/04/2024

Last weekend we had beautiful weather in Auckland. Very low cloud base, drizzle and no aircraft around all day. My vantage point being so close to the clouds. I had to.

Say hello to 2 times 7.5 Watt of LaserCube Ultra power projected onto the clouds themselves.

Impossible to convey the scale of the display but that text was as big as the apartment building I am in.

19/04/2024

My exisiting 2.5W LaserCube Pro's now have two big brothers. Two 7.5W Lasercube Ultra projectors and various accessories.

This is a total of 20 Watt of laser power. Now I have to make them dance like a team.

19/04/2024

Preparing branding for an Upcoming Urge event.

22/03/2024

Woohoo! Beatline is gonna be there, more laser beams, pretty colors and crazier effects.

Tickets go live at 9am Friday 8th……..

https://mandrillapp.com/track/click/6597994/www.iticket.co.nz?p=eyJzIjoiUHdUSjJLUmN3dklJd3ZPTTBSQ3RIODNxQ1NjIiwidiI6MSwicCI6IntcInVcIjo2NTk3OTk0LFwidlwiOjEsXCJ1cmxcIjpcImh0dHA6XFxcL1xcXC93d3cuaXRpY2tldC5jby5uelxcXC9ldmVudHNcXFwvMjAyNFxcXC9tYXlcXFwvZ3J1bnRcIixcImlkXCI6XCI3Mjc1YzUyNGJiOTA0NmM0OTVlNzQwMjBlYzc0YWY3NlwiLFwidXJsX2lkc1wiOltcIjM4YTM3OTk2Yzc4NzQ3NWMyNDVmN2JlYTIwNjY2MWVkYTY4Mzg2NzlcIl19In0

22/03/2024

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkHi859SzSI

Medusa Technology. Beautiful explosions of color. Light that dances with you and the music.

Usually you find show lasers positioned at the far end of the room in order to get the widest reach possible. All perfect lines and beams in rich color. But ...

15/03/2024

Working hard on designing and building new show laser technologies. Right now ideas are just coming too fast but very soon my first formal prototype show laser accesories will be in my hands.

Here is a video showing how a single showlaser (A LaserCube Pro 2.5W) can fill a room in all directions. That's right. 360 degrees.