laser-dac

Unified DAC backend abstraction for laser projectors.

This crate provides a complete solution for communicating with various laser DAC hardware:

• Discovery: Automatically find connected DAC devices (USB and network)
• Workers: Background threads for non-blocking frame output
• Backends: Unified DacBackend trait for all DAC types

This crate does not apply any additional processing on points (like blanking), except to make it compatible with the target DAC.

⚠️ Warning: use at your own risk! Laser projectors can be dangerous.

Supported DACs

The DACs that are not verified, I have not tested with the DAC itself yet. Help to test these would be very welcome!

Quick Start

Connect your laser DAC and run an example. For full API details, see the documentation.

cargo run --example high_level -- circle
# or:
cargo run --example high_level -- triangle

The examples run continuously until you press Ctrl+C.

Discovery Behavior

There are two discovery APIs:

• DacDiscoveryWorker continuously scans in a background thread and auto-connects to new devices, yielding ready-to-use DacWorker instances.
• DacDiscovery is manual: you call scan() and decide if/when to connect() each DiscoveredDevice.

DacDiscoveryWorker runs a background thread that:

1. Scans periodically (default: every 2 seconds, configurable via set_discovery_interval()) for new devices across all enabled DAC types
2. Tracks known devices to avoid duplicate connections
3. Automatic reconnection - when a device connection fails, it's removed from tracking and will reconnect on the next scan

Multiple devices of the same type are supported - each is identified by a unique name (MAC address for Ether Dream, serial number for LaserCube, etc.)

You can also provide a device filter predicate to allowlist devices before the worker connects:

use laser_dac::{DacDiscoveryWorker, DacType, EnabledDacTypes};

let discovery = DacDiscoveryWorker::new_with_device_filter(
    EnabledDacTypes::all(),
    |device| device.dac_type() == DacType::EtherDream,
);

// Update the predicate later while the worker is running.
discovery.set_device_filter(|device| {
    device.dac_type() == DacType::EtherDream && device.name().starts_with("ED-")
});

Coordinate System

All backends use normalized coordinates:

• X: -1.0 (left) to 1.0 (right)
• Y: -1.0 (bottom) to 1.0 (top)
• Colors: 0-65535 for R, G, B, and intensity

Each backend handles conversion to its native format internally.

Data Types

Features

By default, all DAC protocols are enabled via the all-dacs feature.

DAC Features

For example, to enable only network DACs:

[dependencies]
laser-dac = { version = "0.3", default-features = false, features = ["network-dacs"] }

Other Features

USB DAC Requirements

USB DACs (helios, lasercube-usb) use rusb which requires CMake to build.

Acknowledgements

• Helios DAC: heavily inspired from helios-dac
• Ether Dream DAC: heavily inspired from ether-dream
• Lasercube USB / WIFI: inspired from ildagen (ported from C++ to Rust)
• IDN: inspired from helios_dac (ported from C++ to Rust)

License

MIT