| | One day my roommate was browsing eBay and stumbled across a Fresnel lenses that were supposed to be able to project a TV image on to a wall. I did some research to figure out if they were any good, and pretty much that turned out to be a no. But, in the process of the research I stumbled across a Toms Hardware article called Supersize Your TV for $300: Build Your Own XGA Projector!.
Winning the projector |
The project basically consists of getting a normal overhead projector, and putting an LCD panel on top of it. The first part to get was the Overhead projector. After a few weeks of searching, and a couple lost auctions, we found one with a large enough stage, a bright enough bulb, and, most importantly, with in our price range. A few days later, the overhead projector came.
| Pictures of the projector |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |
Winning the monitor |
The next step was to get an LCD monitor. The ideal spec for the monitor was a 13" or 14" monitor, to maximize the area of the monitor that fits on the stage. We returned to eBay to continue our quest. We found a 14" LCD, that based on the description had a broken back light. Since we would be stripping out the back light that really didn't matter. The next step was to strip the monitor down to the VGA decoder and LCD Panel. We were able to do this, but afterwards we hit our first snag.
The problem was a little ribbon cable that connects the two circuit boards that connect directly to the monitor. These boards were placed behind the backlight so it wasn't a problem for the normal configuration, but we needed to unfold them so they wouldn't be in the way when we laid the LCD screen on top of the projector. The little ribbon cable wasn't long enough to do this.| Pictures of the problem with the old LCD Monitor |  |  |  |  |
The solution to this would have been to purchase a FFC connector and two connectors, and use then to build a coupler. We were almost successful with this, but the monitor died before we could succeed with this. Getting enough pressure to hold the connectors together proved really difficult, and none of my roommates or I were good enough with a soldering iron to do anything even close to that small.
So, basically after that the project was on hold until last Friday, when we could get our hands on a new monitor.
New monitor | 
Attached fan |
We were able to acquire a new monitor off of FreeCycle recently. As we dismantled this monitor, we discovered to our surprise and joy, that this monitor didn't have the same configuration as the old one. After getting the new monitor stripped apart, it was a simple matter of placing the monitor on top of the overhead. After we verified that the monitor still worked, we attached a fan to keep the LCD Panel nice and cool. The fan is the same kind of 80mm case fan you would buy for your computer. To power it, we purchased a universal transformer at Wal-Mart and I spliced the fan to it.
| Pictures of the projector |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |
Last but not least, the LCD monitor (a 15") was a little on the large size for the overhead, so movies were getting cut off on the sides. To solve this problem, I wrote a little program that has a Windows Media Player control and allows the user to move the screen around such that it is all visible. I wrote it in about 20 minutes, so it's not very feature rich. The video drivers did not give enough range to the position and size of the screen to make it all visible, and, in addition to that, the monitor auto fixed its self back to center when ever I moved it to far. This program can be downloaded from here. Future versions might be more like full blown HTPC software, but that would be a bit in to the future.
All in all, the project was a great success, though the overhead could be brighter. The edges of the screen are a little dark, and it only works in darkness, but both of those problems could be fixed with brighter overhead. A smaller LCD screen could have also spared the need to write a program to resize a media player. Despite of these problems it works quite well for watching movies.
Links:
Part 1 of the Tom's Hardware Article
Part 2 of the Tom's Hardware Article
Download my media player program here(Requires .Net framework 2.0)
My roommate's xanga post about this
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| | Posted 2/6/2006 12:21 AM - 5777 Views - 12 eProps - 7 comments
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Well done
