I have been reading the forums and collecting the parts since January. Now I have started on my projector. Here is a log of my progress thus far.

My workbench, ready to get started. If only I could keep it that way.


The Parts Laid Out.

Monitor Dissection. THis monitor is a Dell E153FP. It was very easy to take apart.

Constructing the case...


Light Bulb Mount:


Case assembled:

I wanted to be able to adjust the light bulb on three axis. This is the mount I built to allow up/down, left/right movement. This mounts in the slots I cut in the side to give front/back adjustment. I cut these from an old comupter case.

Focus Box:

Rear Control Panel:

Getting prepped to paint:



Holes filled:

Sanding with expert help:

Primed:



Painted:

Mounting the lcd controls:

Add flashing to inside:

Mounted ballast and control panel:



Mounted the LCD boards:

Wiring the box







Shielding the wiring:

First Light!:

Turned it on and everything worked.



The coloring was a little greenish at first:

Hooked up the LCD, once I got it grounded properly, I was able to project an image...



With lots of ambient light ( two south facing windows) the image is washed out, but it is a nice sharp image. The problem is that if I move the screen close enough to fit it on the screen that I have, I do not have enough play in the focus box to get a focused image. It seem that I need to move the image about 5 inches foward. I'm going to have to work on that.

Things to do:

I'm getting closer to a finished projector. I just have to adress a few issues.

1. Runs too hot. The thermometer is showing a temperature between the glass and the collimator of about 105 F. That seems a little warm. It also seems that the LCD, being black, absorbs a bit of heat and get hot. To the touch it feels warmer than the collimator, but that may just be difference in the thermal properties of the different materials. I'm kinda thinking of mounting two small fans over the top vent and either forcing more air into the box to be pulled out the back or pulling air out the top vents as well as the back.


2. Wiring glitch. Somewhere I made a mistake. When I flipped the power switch off, the fans quit running and the light and lcd stayed on. Got it backwards. Should be easy to fix.

3. Focusing. As mentioned above, I need to either move the lense forward with a new focusing box or make a bigger screen. I don't want the screen too big, but the one I have may be a bit on the small side. I was wanting to hang the screen that I have from the wall and pull down and up as needed with a painting or mirror behind it. If I make a bigger screen I will have to just leave it up. I will play with it some and see just how big I need the screen inorder to get a sharp focus and see what to do from there.

It's very exciting seeing it all come together and I think the challenges are what make it the most fun and rewarding. I'm very anxious to get this thing going and hung in my living room.

I vote bigger screen Great worksmanship on the PJ, looks like the kids are having fun with it too.

I'd think the cooling system you have in place now should do a better job than it is. Might look at your airflow path and make sure there are no leaks or to much restriction before adding more fans or the like. If i'm looking at it right, you might have the intake side of the fan starving with that shielding on the back panel. Maybe take that off or move it to the side some for testing purposes and see if you can get more air flow through the box. Maybe look at the air intake slot on the top to make sure it's not restrictive and that the lid is sealing the cooling circuit off well.

Good luck!

Thanks, I was just thinking the same thing on the shielding, I was going to run it today for a while without the shielding. I hadn't thought about the seal. I just had the lid sitting on the top and not screwed down. However, I can feel the air being pulled through the top vent pretty well. We'll see how it works out.

My boys have really enjoyed watching the process and helping out when they can. It's been fun.

Make sure those kids are wearing some welding glasses or some other protective eye wear. We dont need them having bad eye sight at such an early stage from staring at the bulb. Nice Clean Build!

Yeah, I've kept them from looking at it and kept the lid on since.

I took the heat shielding for the wiring off and screwed the lid down. It is still running at the same temp. I'm kinda wondering if the thermometer is accurate. I've worked with commercial projectors that feel warmer than this one. Gotta do some more playing.

I set the projector up in my garage and projected an image about 8 feet wide. I like the large size. Probably going to go this route, especially since I won't have to build a new focus box at this distance.

My garage door is not the perfect screen material. Kinda shiny and a little bumpy. But the image is very nice. The images seem a bit dark. Dark scenes make it hard to see the details. Tried adjusting the brightness and contrast on the monitor but not making much difference. I may have to build enough courage to try and remove the antiglare filter.

I took a few pictures but they are not good. Gotta read up on how to photograph projectors then I will try to post a couple of my current results.

Well, It's been a while since I've updated. Things got real hectic for me here. I've made a lot of progress since I last posted.

Here goes:

I added two fans to the top of the lid and a cover for them. This dropped the temperature into the nintey degree range.






I also built a new longer focus box so that I could focus at a closer distance.

I also got up enough courage to pour water on my lcd and do an anti glare removal. I'm not sure why I was so nervous, it was very easy to do. The key seems to be patience. It took me about 4 hours to get it off.

Before:




Paper towels soaked with distilled water:



Removal:



Finished:

Here are a few shots from the projector while I still had it in my garage. It is projecting ont the screen that is pictured in previous posts. It should be noted that this is a dvd playing through a cheap line doubler. It causes the images to appear a little washed out.

My plan was to hang the projector from the ceiling of my living room. This involved moving out my previous setup. I needed a place to put all my equipment so I took a day and built a simple cabinet.

I have now mounted the projector and the screen in my living room.







You can see my boys trying to play the xbox during the day. I put up some blinds behind the hanging blinds but it is still a bit bright for viewing. You can see the screen and see what is going on but it is very washed out. I currently have it set up so that I can watch the standard tv during the day and at night I can watch my projector. The best images are when the lights are all off.

The screen I used is an interesting topic.

I originally inted to use the screen that I have mounted, but when I built the projector, I could not focus on the screen as close as it needed to be to fit. So I decided I should make a bigger screen. I bought some blackout cloth in town and taped it to my garage door and found that the results were pretty good. However, after a lot of thought, I decided that I didn't want a seam in my screen (from joining two pieces of cloth) so I constrained my image height to the width of the blackout cloth. Then when I measured the resulting width, I found that it was only 2 inches wider than my original screen. I went ahead and built a new focus box and used the original screen. This allows me to roll the screen up and hide it when I want to.

Well I'm impressed. How big is the image you're projecting??

Damn, I wanna be those kids dads.

I did some measuring last night and it looks like I have a diagonal of about 72 inches (4:3). Not as big as some but still respectable. A lot nicer than my old 27 inch tv.

I dug up a before picture for comparison with my current living room arrangement.



Here is the current setup.



With the lights off.

And now a parade of screen shots. I'll begin with the seemingly mandatory 5th element shot. It should be noted that the camera seems to give the images a slight greenish tint and it introduces a slight amount of noise that is visible in the full size shots...).

Overall I'm pretty happy with the projector. I still have some work that I need to do to try to improve the image. My lenses need to be cleaned a bit and I need to try to adjust the bulb to get a little more even distribution of light. You can see some of this from this shot of a white image.



My major complaint is that dark scenes seem very dark, they lack definition. The first movie I watched on this was 16 Blocks. It is a very dark film and I was very disappointed. I have since made some adjustments that make dark scenes better and I am much happier, but I would like to improve this further. Maybe the changes mentioned above will help. Maybe I need to get the newer bulb. Here is a relatively dark scene.



Overall, this have been a very rewarding project. I'm pleased with the results and hope to improve them in the future. Any thoughts and suggestions would be more than welcome.

If you're using a PC, the ATI card / software I use has profiles for fullscreen overlay
video. I've got one set for pretty much every situation: Dark, Toon, TV, Bright, SUN.

The "Sun" setting is my way overblown contrast setting.

I'm using Xbox Media Center (XBMC) with an HD Pack and a Vdigi converter. I have adjusted the settings. The problem is when I get it so that the dark scenes are watchable then the characters go outside and it is way too washed out...

Yeah... had that happen. It's really too bad there isn't an intelligent brightness
regulator box or something.

I'll take one...

very nice setup man!

is it hard to see the screen with the projector that close?

If you are standing at the back of the room the projector gets in the way. If you are sitting anywhere in the room it is now problem. That's the advantage of having it hanging.