Linux support for LaserDock / LaserCube?

[legel]

Greetings Volst dev team,

I’m working on a 3D scanning robot and am adding a laser to it. I’m evaluating the LaserCube, but see that there is no support for Linux? The rest of our robot currently runs from an Ubuntu command line... I’m wondering if maybe some / all of the MacOS libraries might be compatible?

I’m very new to the lasers industry and so am not yet familiar with all of my options. All that I know is that I’d like a way to have a neural network automatically change the output of a laser projector in response to a camera image input... The LaserCube appears powerful and precise enough in terms of x-y resolution, but maybe you’ve had better experiences programming with a certain device + DAC?

Thanks!
And feel free to follow up at lance@3co.ai, we could potentially pursue a collaboration, and our 3D scanning robot is actually in Amsterdam.

[legel]

Quick follow up: Do we think a Windows 10 virtual machine (on top of a Linux) would have problems with installing and addressing device drivers, etc?

[SpaceK33z]

Hey @legel! Interesting usecase you've got there!

We currently don't support Linux on LaserDock (which uses the same API as LaserCube) purely because we use a custom build of laserdocklib and I didn't have time to spin up a Linux machine to compile on that.

If you want to use our laser-dac API in combination with Laserdock and Linux, first fork this repository. You should be able to build everything with the instructions in the readme here: https://github.com/Volst/laser-dac/tree/master/packages/laserdock/laserdocklib. The resulting .so file you get from building should be placed in packages/laserdock/sdk.

And that should be it! If you could do a PR to this repo we'll gladly merge it.

You could also write C++ code and use the laserdocklib directly; it's more difficult but if you're going to do advanced things with it it might be better/faster. In that case checkout the circle example.

[legel]

Perfect, this is very encouraging. Probably I will go for this, and report back with a PR if successful.

[Noir-]

I can confirm that the way @SpaceK33z described works fine. Would be a PR with the x86_64 binary enough? Libusb is missing as well but on must Linux systems it can be installed via the package manager.

[ServeurpersoCom]

I'm also interested in linux lasercube devs