A brief discussion of laser safety technologies and free safety related info available from Pangolin
What I like to introduce
is William Benner. He is the president and owner of Pangolin Laser Systems. Bill and I are friends for many many years
...and particularly in laser safety in general.
Now with Bills assistance,
I was able to get a audience scanning variance.
first US also in juneau shared
That took about two years
old to safeguard wall
does call me first a
for all of our good
working on this so I for things
Oro of jurors favored
so mister
The Introduction was very gracious and very kind. I thank you very much
for pretending to this. So
Greg introduce me as William Benner. I'm not Conan O'Brien although I get
accused
that very often. So
you know I got a little presentation here and I debated whether to put this at the
beginning or the end of
my thing at my presentation I'm gonna be given you, so only
over about five minutes long PowerPoint presentation. I know it's about nine
o'clock in the morning here in Las Vegas and everybody
some people might have flown in or might had a late night or something like that
and so
so I think up with this at the beginning at the presentation because it is a kinda
it it's pretty interesting I if you're not awake
right now, rather than
put you to sleep with the PowerPoint presentation. I think I'll tried to
wake you up with this,
with this little presentation right here. So what I've got here
is at a projector it's made in China. It may as well be
any laser projector made in China, because a lot of them
are made in the same way. Of
course there's a good laser projectors made in China and
not so good, this one here is a 300mW white light projector
which costs only two hundred fifty dollars. So it's very accessable to
anybody
and so because its low-price it at very attractive.
So when I first turn the power on this here, I just gonna
the power in and what you're gonna see
for a brief moment is a static
for Power Beam, before
it goes into its own little built-in pattern projection
thing. Now a look very common
product and very common for
projectors made in China to have pattern projectors built inside of them.
And its kind of handy because you know it's basically
go through a tone little pattern here, that is switchable and selectable on the back.
You can connected DMX to the projector you can control it with a lighting
board.
But more interesting to all of us here is that
it has this ILDA connector on the back, so that you can plug just a
a more powerful laser software into it, such as the stuff that we make.
Now the interesting thing is this, the way the it notes whether to be
controlled
with external software or to be
producing patterns with its internal pattern projector, is
it has this little sensor basically on the connector.
So that when you plug the connector in, it knows, now
I shouldn't use the internal pattern projector anymore. I could use the
software instead.
Now what I have just plugged in here through this ILDA cable is our FB3.
Its the least expensive hardware that we make and
what just happened is exactly what you would expect to happen.
I connect the external controller and nothing comes out the projector and as
soon as our software start putting something out then
that would be coming out a projector. But
what happens when something goes wrong.
So think about this. Here's
a laser hardware controller
made by competitor. And watch what happens when I plug the competitors
in. What we get out is
a full power static beam. And the reason is because
the lasers inside this projector are something called TTL lasers.This is very
common
for Chinese projectors. What TTL basically means in the former of a laser
is, that the lasers either
fully on, or fully off. The reason why
TTL lasers are found in a lot of Chinese projectors is because a lot of them are
lower-cost
and so they have a lower power lasers inside and so by using TTL lasers
there either on or off. It's an artificial way of making the
projector seem brighter. The problem with TTL lasers
in many cases is they do something called - I know there's a lot of electronic
engineers in the room -
they do something called floating high. So that means when you disconnect
the signal going into the laser, it becomes on, not off.
And so when this has switched its
internal signal from the pattern projectors the external signal,
it switches the TTL lasers to be controlled by this.The TTL lasers flow
hi and since most electronics,
when you take the power off of them, when you turn the power off,
electronics kinda goes floppy, it becomes lifeless.
It becomes as though it's disconnected. So even though
the projector senses that something is connected to the cable,
everything's powered off in this box, the box is lifeless, it's not really pulling
down the signal,
so you get a full brightness signal out. Now the way
it works with ours is, we use special components
in our FB3, we knew this was a problem.
So we use special components. The component that we use in here are made
by only two companies in the entire world.
Since there is a low supply. It means that the
the supplying demand, there's higher prices.
So we had to pay good money to put this feature into our software,
into our hardware and so, you know when I'm saying is that
we are very safety conscious. One of the things that
we run into when we, Greg can I go up to
CDRH is,they
don't wanna hear all the features we have and
what's working when everything is going right.
What they wanna know is, what is it do when something goes wrong.
And so it's really a different mindset of
failsafe design.
This word failsafe, is really a word that is in the popular cultural. Because of that
it tends to lose its meaning.
What feel safe means is that when something fails,
it will fail in such a way as to become safer
not more hazardous. That's what fail safe means. And
we put this kind of design methodology.
And when we're designing piece of software or hardware, we're always thinking like this.
What happens when something goes wrong.
That's really a very important thing.
So we talk about lasers as you know a
with respect to the discussion you will be having here, the classic, Greg is
doing
putting on, we're really talking about lasers in
the basically three different forms. Here's a picture that was taken
in Australia lasers in airspace. As you can see these beams are at least
projecting horizontally if not up
into the air. Overhead beam effects,
which will be seeing a lot in the next few days here at
Lighting Dimensions International. Beam effects projected
over the people heads and of course audience scanning.
Now, Pangolin has a number of tools built into our software
and, that we sell in addition to this,
which will help you in all three of this cases.
The first one we´re gonna be talking about is our beam attenuation maps feature.
What this basically is, is a way in the software,
where you can reduce the power or even completely eliminate laser power
in certain areas. This is a a little screenshot, I kinda mopped up in our
BEYOND software, what it shows you is, that we have some areas here, that are kinda
curved
where we don't want a laser to go. I put a couple a little boxes up in here.
I'm sure Greg is talking about lasers that might wind themselves up
on a video projector. Even though it
it's projecting light, these video projectors are actually
susceptible to lasers going back into the lens. It can hurt the video projector.
Or these things could be video cameras, you know,
if you're in the Grammys or something like that, where they have a
lot of cameras around.
So let's say you want to shoot the lasers around the camera space,
that will be very exciting for the cameras to see it. But if the the laser goes
right into the camera then it could be harmful.
And so when are being attenuation maps feature, you can
prevent laser light from going into those areas. And also you can even create
a gradient. What you'll see is here, it goes from a
full power area, down into an area about 20 percent of
brightness. One of the things that is great and we´re talking about later is audience scanning.
And how this all works.
It is pretty important to reduce the laser power that comes down in to the audience.
If you do that gradually, like you do here in our beam attenuation
map feature, then you know, then it works pretty well.
So this is in all of our software. It even in QuickShow, the least expensive
software has essentially the same beam attenuation map
capability as our most expensive software. Which is
caleld Beyond. And it is absolutely free. Is a built in feature.
Its not something you pay before extra. And there's a lot of exclusive things about
this
to Pangolin. Such as the ability to create curved areas,
the ability to create gradient and that's sort of thing. The reason why these
exclusive, you might have heard
a features like this in other software they might be called
safety zones or something like that but nobody has
the degree of flexibility and power that we do
because we patented this. We invented this
in 2001. We patented this and so the
the other guys, you know they don't want to get too close to that patent.
So they'll do some things kind of on the edges and that kinda thing
but nothing is, gives you the degree of flexibility and power
that our beam attenuation maps has.
I like to talk about another thing I have heard, before that class start to do some interesting
audience scanning, and I and Greg we were talking about this
This is something that you could put on a projector
to help to make the projector safe. So what this does
is it reduces, it increases the divergence
of the laser as it comes down through the audience.
But gives full non diverged full power beams
above the audience. And because of this
it gives a very immersive experience while also giving a very safe experience.
There's several ways of doing this. You could put a dedicated lens
in the entire laser projector and thats kinda in some ways the safest way
because
the lens can't be removed, it can't fall out the beam path.
The bad news about that is, its affects all of the beams projected by the
laser. Whether they're projected
above the heads or not. So the safety can lenses
because it's a half lense, it only affects the beams below the horizon.
If you have a laser projector they have some
screw holes on the side at the exit aperture, this amount will go
right there and allow you to attach that.
That lense to the projector. And if you don't, one of the things we have as a retrofit
situation here,
is little tabs that could be,
this red trip is actually tape, it sounds very
unsophisticated very,
it just doesn't sound like a safe scenario with
taping something on a projector. This is made by VHB tape
VHB stands for very high bond, There's a gentleman here from
....
Yes, so this is basically military-grade double faced tape.
The cures in 72 hours, in 72 hours
afterwards. It's going to be basically impossible to remove this.
This is a permanent fixture on the projector. after 72 hours. So
this is a very secure way. Even though these kind of things are exclusive to
Pangolin,
we don't use this as an opportunity to
you charge you for very high prices.
The lens we charge a hundred dollar for,
this lense mount is available for $29.95. So
really really affordable stuff to add to a projector. So
this helps to make a projector safe. And this next thing called PASS,
helps to keep a projector safe. What PASS does is it monitors
the entire internal behavior of a laser projector.
It monitors the power supplies, it monitors the laser,
monitors the shutter activity, it monitors the basically the overall health the
projector.
And if anything is going out of kilter, this thing will terminate
the exposure. Either momentarily or permanently. It will
forcibly turn off the projector to the point, where you have to actually
unplug it or press a reset button or something else like that. So this,
This can work with TTL as well. Normally this would be built
into a projector and Greg Makov sells a line
of projectors with pass build into it. And so
audience scanning in the United States is something you are interested in, I
would
encourage you to check out what Greg has to offer.
Actually what's more interesting and more important than hardware,
purchased by anybody. Even somebody that is reputable as Pangolin,
is the variance. So just because you have this stuff build into your projector,
doesn't mean that you
in automatically and instantly start to do audience scanning.
You have to get variance for that. And that's something that Greg is very
well-versed in. So
we are very fortunate that the later industry
ILDA that has recognized our safety related products.
In 2002 we perceived the highest place awarded
on technical achievement award for projection zones,
of which are beam attenuation maps are a part, in
2006 we've received a first-place award for PASS
and in 2012, most recently, we've received a
first place to work for a safe scan lenses. So we've been very fortunate that
safety is really not the glamorous end what we do.
And so we were fortunate that the recognition was still there.
In these products.
So as Greg mentioned, we've actually got a really long history
of participation in the,
in field of safety. Greg Makov and I and Patrick Murphy have all given
in our presentations at the International laser safety conferences.
We have given invited presentations
at the FDA, the CDRH. Both individual personal meetings with
top people there. And also something called stakeholders meetings. And that's
where
the CDRH will open up to everybody who is
involved on some level. Everybody who is affected by
regulations. They have big meetings where they invite everybody,
and they want to hear from people, so that we can help to
draft the regulations. Help to make sure that they are reasonable and so
forth.
So we have also published several articles,
And all of this is actually available on our website. And
most recently we have compiled all of this information
into a single kinda of report. A special report
that we will give you for free, just send an email to safety@pangolin.com
and we will make sure you receive that.
So Pangolin is really not all about
products, all about sales. We're really,
just as Greg was talking about earlier today, about
giving out the information to make sure people have great information.
On our website you'll see that there's a section here called laser resources.
And the laser resources, this is of the things that are available at the laser
resources.
Safety part of the laser resources is the largest part.
There are a number of articles here. Here's an article on
audience scanning that I wrote 1997. It's been updated a couple of times since
then.
One other things Greg may be getting into, is
how we have established that you can laser static beam,
10mW per square centimeter. How that can get along with a
scan fail safe guard, can make sure that the rest of the show is safe.
Greg will be going into that. At the very bottom of this article
we derive, how it is that we get there.
And this is confusing thing too many people and so
if you're confused after you leave this class, you really
shake hands with Greg here, but if you are confused after you leave this class,
you might wanna check out that article there.
We also have John O'Hagans
whole, he made a whole doctoral thesis about audience scanning
and how it can be done safely.
That's available right at the website as well,
100 percent free. There's no login or anything else. You can access this
information at anytime you want. The article
Patrick and I wrote about lasers and aviation safety, is in fact
two articles up there. And these are the most to quote
articels in this field. We have been contacted by numerous
airline pilot Association magazines, and that sort of thing, and they wind up
quoting
these articles that are here. And even
using some other pictures and the graphs that were to write for that.
And I know this is specific to the United States, but
there is something up here, that was written by
one of our UK members. And it is an entire
generic policy. A risk assessment and a contract, that you wind up giving your
prospective people who you do
with for home you do laser shows. And
its all up there. Just download it, you can modify it your own company
and then just use it for free. So
we also have on a part of our laser chat forum,
an entire safety section. So if you have any questions about laser safety,
you can actually post them on the forum, and get answers by
safety professionals.
So I wont take up anymore your time off, hand you over to Greg here.
I'd only ask, that when it comes time
to give some consideration, to who it is that's going to control your laser
projectors,
that you give some consideration to Pangolin. Because I think that we
demonstrated some clear leadership and innovation
in the field laser safety. Thank you very much.