The meter, at least as I envisioned it, is dead. Like the dinosaurs and the dodo bird, the meter just has no future given a better way of doing a mask. That is via real time interactive measurement.
This is how the NanoDlp Mask Generation Wizard is intended to work, and while it does work, it is painful and tedious. NanoDlp displays an image of squares. You measure the light from those squares to find the one that is least bright. You then adjust all the other squares to be the same light level. The mask level for the least bright cell will be unadjusted (255). The rest will be lower values as the lower the value the darker the grey and the less light is passed through.
So enter a little bit of software that was what I should have been working on since I started this series of articles. Display a square at each corner of the print area and have the user move a light meter probe to each square. Remember which one is the dimmest. Then display squares across the screen asking the user to put the probe into each square as it is displayed. Automatically (that being the key!) lower the brightness of that square until it is the same as the lowest. Record the results as values for a mask (or generate the mask there and then).
There are a couple of people in the Wanhao D7 group on Facebook that are already working on this and making good progress. I have been kindly given the code for one of them which is what has convinced me that my original meter concept is unworkable. I will probably do my own version now that I have come to that conclusion as it will be fun. Which is why I do any of this stuff!
I can salvage the last meter that I built to be used as the probe for this solution but the more sophisticate meter is, in effect, a dodo bird.
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