Text and SVG all garbled using YUER 5w laser with Helios DAC

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1

This Chinese YUER 5w RGB laser seems to do the stock Liberation patterns just fine, but when it comes to text it looks like someone threw a dice – letters are all at different angles and out of order, and do not match the font I requested. The laser comes with an Android app and 4 childish fonts, and I am really hoping to get some good fonts and images for various protests we’re needing these days in the US. Is it possible the CPU in this laser just can’t handle text? It didn’t handle an SVG properly either. Might there be settings I should look for? Thanks for any advice.

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Hi Rex, welcome and glad you’ve joined the forum! Thanks for sharing the detail about what you’re seeing, that helps a lot. But it could still be any number of different things!

  1. Too much text or complexity – Lasers don’t render fonts the same way a computer does. Text and SVGs get converted into vector paths, and if there are a lot of points or curves, any hardware can struggle. Although that usually shows up as flickering rather than jumbled shapes.

  2. Corrupted fonts or SVGs – if the content has a lot of weird data in it could cause problems. If you’d like to share the font or SVG you’re trying, I can take a look and see if they need tidying up.

  3. Hardware scanner problems – If the galvanometers aren’t tracking properly, letters can come out skewed or misaligned. A video of the projection would help figure out if this is the case.

  4. Laser settings – Try slowing down the scanner speed and see if the shapes improve. Also check the scanner sync, which is a more subtle adjustment but can make a difference: Check the Laser settings guide for more information.

Hopefully one of those will narrow it down – let us know how you get on!

Best
Seb

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Thanks for the thorough reply. I made some progress – slowing down the scanner speed made the projected font more resembleitself. I guess because I’m a new user I’m not allowed to upload attachments, but when I’m an old user I will upload the strobing of text and and strobing and partial drawing of an SVG that I’m getting, as well as an example of one goal – creating the ticker tape stream that the YUER laser can do. Not wipe on, wipe off (reveal one way then erase the other) but rather a running stream that’s moving across the view screen – I’m not sure if any of the wave functions would accomplish that. I’d also upload a single line font called thanks-teacher that gets turned into an outline anyway; it’d be far less to draw if only the single line got drawn. Thanks.

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Good to hear that slowing the scanner speed has already made things look closer to what you want - progress!

It does sound like you’re pushing too much content at once. I wouldn’t want to rule out dodgy scanners either, since that can also cause strange behaviour. Also bear in mind that the Helios DAC has a fairly limited frame size, so if there are too many points it will simply cut off the end of the frame.

For a ticker tape you can create a long line of text and move it across the frame by changing its x position with a sawtooth oscillator. You can mask the edges by adding black rectangles over the left and right, or just let the text run off the edges of the projection area.

Single-line fonts aren’t directly supported yet, but you can use Inkscape’s Hershey Text add-on and export as an SVG. Hershey fonts are a single-line vector format created in the 60s, and they still work well for lasers because they massively reduce point counts. Proper single-line font support is on the roadmap.

If you’re still getting strobing, try smoothing the paths a little so the laser has fewer sharp corners to draw, or switch the clip to the FAST render profile which is designed for higher-speed drawing: render profiles guide.

And I’ve approved your forum account now so hopefully you can post images / video, otherwise feel free to link to google drive / YouTube / iCloud whichever :blush:

Best
Seb