Good stuff Buying the pre-fab MDF is so much easier than buying a sheet the size of a football field. Now that im using a widescreen LCD, i'm going to make my box slightly wider than it is tall. (mainly so my 450mm MDF will fit together nicely.

I havent put much thought into the fresnels heating up although thanks for reminding me The last thing you want is a bowed or cracked fresnel in the middle of a movie. I picked up some 3mm thick MDF sheet yesterday aswell. Im going to cut peices of this for between the 12mm to give the lenses something to sit on. (so it really is like a sandwich! although not a very tasty one)

Sounds like your box will be about the same size as mine Im not game enough to mount this monster on my ceiling. (ceiling is at a 45 degree angle too which would make it even more difficult!)

I'm cutting my wood this morning. Will post pics afterwards to let you know the progress.

Cutting the wood... this 'stack' is for the inner pieces.. (10 in total)

This task is made so much more difficult by the fact that I don't have a table saw. I did all my major cutting with a circular saw.

The final peices...

I have also realised I made a slight error. I will probably need to trim my fresnel sandwich peices.

Yeah, thought about that, with a nice hassish (sounds illegal) taper to it, but I decided to mount my lamp vertically for the (hopefully) extra few lumens.

Good job making a start on the box.

I'd love more info on why mounting the lamp vertical is better than horizontal.. Any ideas where you picked this up?

It's something that is discussed in some of the more 'experienced' (read extreme, insane etc) members' plogs, and comes up quite often. People like Elken, Arizona Video, Dazzzla, Durachko and Samurai Jack are absolute knowledge factories on this type of stuff - I recommend you read their plogs, if you haven't already.

I was reading SculptorM's plog last night (a must read also) and AV brings it up there too.

As for me, I can't remember the whyfores, but they are in there.

Edit: How could I forger Pun15her and Simul8tr from the list of must read stuff - must be something about numbers in names!

Nice work so far.
Keep it up.
The vertical lamp placement was Sim's discovery I believe!
Cheers P

Thankyou both for your comments. I've been reading this forum for months and still finding hoards and hoards of info buried deep within.

I am actually thinking of mounting my lamp vertically but from the roof of the PJ box. Once you see how my components are laid out internally you'll see why.

An update on my progess... Yesterday all I really did was cut my wood. Much to my dismay I discovered that I made a booboo and will have to cut the sides of my box again. (32mm too short) That's what I get for not writing down exactly what I needed. (any fool can cut a box right? ) Anyway, it won't be slowing my progress as I don't need the sides of the box to continue building.

Today i've been working on just the back panel...

The back panel with the fan holes complete, and some of the electrical component holes done...

Looking back, I spent WAY to long cutting holes. I didn't have the right tools at all which made the process so much more difficult. (really just had a drill and some sandpaper) I should have brought a proper 120mm hole cutting attachement for the drill which would have made things easier. Also you'll notice in the previous picture the holes for the switches are done with a round drill bit, then made larger with manual sanding. I really need one of those square hole cutter drill bit attachment things.

My back is killing me. You labourers out there do it tough. I'll take my desk job anyday. Not as far a long as I would have liked at this stage but thats life.

Tomorrow i'd like to get the back panel finished (and fans mounted maybe) then I can start work on the 240V wiring.

Sweet!

I step away for a day or two and you are moving right along.....

I agree on your monitor choice, you'll have great results with the DVI to DVI.

I can't believe you cut those holes and then hand sanded the rest! Nice work. You're going to be tired by the end of this build...... or maybe investing in a Dremel would be good.

Anyway, again, nice work, looking good and thanks for all the great pics!

Keep it up.

Thanks for your comments guys!

I'll be moving along much slower next week. Back to work i'm afraid. After today I won't be able to do anymore work until next weekend. (I think)

Would love to get hold of a dremel. Would make this small hole work MUCH easier! Alas, i'm nearly done.

I've been trying to include as many pics of each step as I can. I know there are people out there like you that appreciate them.

I'm off to fix these switches. I would have finished it lastnight but the mozzies were killing me.

We have switches!

Time for some wiring.

The main wiring from the wall is almost complete. I applied too much heat to one of the switch terminals and it made a strange burning sound. I tested the whole setup with a multimeter and I get no connection between the active wire from the broken switch. Will have to replace it which isn't going to be fun.

Here's some pics...

A close up view of the wiring. The fan and ballast aren't connected, but I threw them in to give you an idea on my setup.

You can see there are 4 lots of active, ground and neutral wires from the 12way terminal block. This means I can wire and control my 2 fans, ballast and LCD independently.

Wiring is fun!

Very nice work, Yakkers.

Pity about the switch, but I love to see electrical work as neat as yours. I'm probably going to use a power board inside mine, as the LCD, eBallast and 12v plug pak (1.5A from DSE!) will all go straight in. I bought a 10A circuit breaker to fit to the back of the box, and it looks very cool, but the powerboard has one built in and I can drill a hole through for access.

I've been giving a lot of thought to simplicity and quickness (given I have so little time to work on it), so I intend for my PJ to look nice but be as simple as poss. within what I'm setting out to achieve. I'm already designing a 2nd PJ in my head for when I can afford another, or am willing to take this one off-line for a while having gotten it out of my system.

Nice to see you have got ahead of me, but hopefully I'll get a couple of catchup hours at the end of next week while you're suffering back at work

Very nice work InSomnYak......

I wish our guts looked as good as yours..... very nice.

Take your time with the switch and make it look just as nice for the fix. A little bad luck, but it's looking great from the inside and out.

Keep it up!

Cheers!

The wiring took me the most part of half a day, but I think it was worth it. Would have been much simpler to just include a single switch for the whole swag of connections, but I like the 4 switches. Will probably do some more work on it Thursday. Replacing the faulty switch on the weekend.

I did think about putting a powerboard in there, but most of the components have removable cables anyway (the ballast has a little 'door' which allows terminal access to the A, N and E connections.

As you can see my projector is huge, but im already thinking of ways to make it smaller. (eventually!)

Good luck with your PJ.

yaK

Thanks swill01!

If I can't make it look nice from the outside, (big ugly MDF box) I mayaswell make it look good on the inside. I've always been a fan of zip-ties hehe.

Was a little annoyed at the switch failing but thats what I get for getting over enthusiastic about the soldering. Was trying to ignore the fact the terminal screwed up, but I figure its not worth it when 240V wiring is in use!. (also the multimeter test failed, so it needs to be replaced anyway) Will probably use my solder sucker tool to remove the solder from the connections, then slide the new swtich straight in. I'd like to think I can make it looks exactly the same as the other switches.

Back at work today, so won't be much in the way of progress updates this week.

yaK

"OMG I screwed up moment #1"

Ok, I replaced my switch and wired the fans today. The switch was a pain and I couldn't get one exactly like the original so 1 switch looks totally different to the other 3. Also, when something looks different its probably made different... upon checking with the multimeter, the pins are numbered backwards to my original switches! (pins 1 and 2 for active, 3 for neutral... where-as my original swithces are 2 and 3 for active, 1 for neutral)

Anyway, all looks good nicely cable tied and P-clamped to the base of my box. This brings us to "OMG I screwed up moment #1". I was wiring the ballast and I noticed that the wires were around the wrong way (blue for neutral and brown for active) I checked on the 'net and it appears my entire projector is wired in reverse. The ballast wires were in fact correct!!! All my blue wires are active and brown wires are neutral. What on earth was I thinking???

I can technically wire my terminal block into to the opposite colours (blue to brown, brown to blue) and all should be ok, but I cant help wondering if it is worth ripping it out and starting over. The fans and ballast wouldn't need to be re-wired, just the power connector and switches.

What do you people think? (also, the wiring diagram a few pages back is WRONG.. colours are backwards)

It looks like it took you a while to get wiring that neat. It would be a shame (and probably somewhat discouraging) to have to rip it out to go right back and do it again.

I would suggest that you wire it in the way it is to get some light and make some forward progress on the other components on your projector. If it still bugs you down the road you could replace it, but I'm pretty sure that when you're playing xbox 360 on a 10' screen you won't be thinking "oh no, brown to blue! I better take this all apart so the wire colors match."

Thanks for the comments PhDeviant,

I have decided to leave it the way it is for now. I need to progress on my projector rather than worry about a small wiring issue.

I cut the middles out of my wood frames today. I'll upload some pics when I get a hold of my digital cam again. It's an absolute pain in the butt cutting 8 exact sized holes in the frames.

I also cut one of my fresnels to size. I also discovered my UV panel is slightly too small for its frame. (about 10mm on each side) I'll deal with this problem at a later stage.

Hi All,

Firstly, apologies for the delay in updates. Things are quite busy at work and I haven't been home much. This past week I finished the main wiring and almost finished cutting the frames for my lenses and LCD. Also, I hate posting updates without being able to show you what i've been up to. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Here are my frames... There are 8 in total and all made from 12mm MDF....

Heres the LCD frames. There is a 3mm MDF spacer between the 12mm frames which gives the LCD something to sit on. (this will be the same for the others also)

You can see the peice of wood sticking out horizontally towards the bottom. This is to support the FFC. Its probably not the best way to approach it and it will cause issues with the last fresnel (it will slide over the top of the FFC) but I know this way im minimising the risk of damage.

Another shot of the LCD frames... There is quite a bit of cutting involved for this frame to get the 3mm spacer correct and the FFC support in place. All adds to the fun of using a jigsaw.

Onto the wiring... as mentioned previously, I put a lot of effort into making it neat, only to discover my Active and Neutral wires are reversed. You can see how I approached the fix from the pic... simply reversing the devices that are attached to the terminal block. (the fans aren't affected from the mis-wiring as they aren't polarised anyway)

Also I managed to replace the faulty switch without damage to any of the existing wiring.

It's important when working with 240V wiring that you have correctly grounded any metal components. You'll notice on both fans I have sanded the chassis back to bare metal and attached a ground wire which goes back to the groudn pin in the socket. Grounding the fans directly also means all the screws that hold the fans on the box and also the fan gaurds (see next post) are also grounded.

My multimeter test checks out perfectly. All switches are working correctly and each of the terminal block pins corresponds to the correct pin on the power plug socket.

The back panel...

If I were cutting this again I would have just brought the correct sized hole cutter attachment for the exhaust fans.

Come on InSomnYak...... this looks great. Don't beat yourself up, everything is looking very good. Keep it up.

Thanks Swill I'm already looking forward to the MkII

Great to see how busy you've been while I've been away.

Re the fans - are they spinning backwards?

Welcome back.

I was hoping to have the label side on the inside of the box but it's on the outside. According to the arrows on the fans, (which are pointing outwards and clockwise) they are correctly aligned. Im hoping they are marked correctly, but I guess we'll see when its first fired.

The fans i've used are quite heavy. I know this because I stopped one with my bare foot when it fell towards the cement at maximum velocity. Bruised... ouch.

Going to do some more work tomorrow. I want to get my fresnel and UV filter frames completed and screwed together. I have to drill the alignment holes in the frames out because the whole sandwich when put together is waaaay out of alignment. (the price you pay for cutting holes with a hand drill )

Australia Day (26 Jan) is only 7 days away. Can it be done? We'll see.

I've made a little progress today. Went to Bunnings and brought some more wood for the sides. (to replace the bits that I cut too short ) Also picked up a sheet of aluminium to use for my heat shield in the lighting area.

My fresnels have been cut to size and each frame test fitted together. I've drilled 4 more holes in each frame which means the frames can be held together independently as opposed to being all screwed together at once. (much easier this way)

Oh, and I plugged my baby into the wall. It's a great feeling to see the lights on the switches come on and the fans come to life. Much quieter than I expected. Still haven't wired the LCD or bulb yet, but they will most likely happen after my frames are completed.

But, it seems I have a little problem. The bottom part of my LCD frame (where the FFC and controller boards will be) sticks out about 70mm which means my field fresnel is 70mm from the LCD. What are the potential effects of this??? To fix I can probably remove the entire bottom half of the field fresnel frame so it sits on top of the controller boards. I'll also need to trim the bottom of the field fresnel.

Thoughts?

Are you game to let your FFC go to 180* instead of 90*? That way it would drop down, presumably to the side of your air gap. You will need to remove your FFC platform and then cut a slot at the bottom of your frame to feed the connector cable back under the LCD, and then you can mount your LCD boards between the LCD and the lens.

This is what I'm doing, and I will have the fresnel about 25mm from the LCD. Would this setup work for you?

Thanks for your comments. I did consider this but unfortunately if I let it drop to 180 degrees the steel rod that holds the frames together gets in the way. I guess I didn't plan this as well as I should have Although I did work on the frames before I brought my LCD. hehehe

I think i'll have to do some more chopping of the last fresnel frame to get it to fit together.

My frames are all done, finished. Not more holes to drill for now. (phew)

I've mounted the LCD in its final resting place. Its important to take your time on this and not rush it. The 3mm MDF between the two sheets of 12mm fits around the LCD itself perfectly. I've also screwed down the FFC cables to the support. (see below)

Oh, and it appears I didn't buy enough bolts.

The suspense was killing me. I had to plug my LCD into the wall after mounting it. I am pleased to say that the screen still works. I didn't have a light source behind the whole thing, so I had to test it with the camera flash. For a split second the picture looks nice and bright

The controller boards you see towards the bottom will be mounted on a peice of MDF that is attached to the LCD frame itself. (at a 90 degree angle) This means i'd be able to move the LCD frame relative to the others and not worry about my controller boards screwing up.

I used my XBOX360 VGA cable to test the LCD. Test Drive Unlimited looks great on the LCD even though its upside down, back to front, and has no backlight.

With the LCD and frames almost complete, I thought it was a good time to start on my lighting setup.

Below you can see the mount for the reflector. The slots at the front will be for the pre-condensor mount. All my holes have been drilled out and everything has a LOT of play. This way I fine control over the X, Y, Z, and rotation.

It's not as elaborate as I wanted to make it, but sometimes the simplest things are most effective.

Back to work again next week.. won't be able to post another update until next Friday. (Australia Day) Looks like I missed my deadline, but hope to have the projector at least functional by the following Monday. (29th Jan)

Im back! Apologies for the delay in updates, but work is crazy busy right now and I haven't even had a chance to take photos of my progress let alone post an update!

Here are some more pics of my lighting setup... I've decided to leave the pre-condensor lens out of the equation for now (can add it in later) to make initial calibration easier.

I fear that the reflector is way too small for the bulb. The bulb that originally came with the reflector was 'flat' so allowed the blub arc to be much closer to the reflectors focal point.

Top view of the lighting...

Here is the lighting, the UV sheild and fresnels aligned correctly. (assuming my maths is correct ) I've switched to the unsplit fresnel design for now. (btoh fresnels are in the frame on the left)

Oh, and you may notice that black peice of duct tape on the top right of the pic. Who needs to make correct wood measurements and cuts when you can duct tape the extra peices on! (yes, I plan on re-re-cutting this peice at some stage )

My heat sheild set-up. Very simply and needs some black paint, but it'll do the job for now. I don't anticipate the 150W will get too hot but a heat sheild never hurt anyone.

My 19" LCD controller boards in the box. I'm going to mount these to the peice of wood you see underneath, then mount the wood to the LCD frame itself. I cringe at the thought of the FFC socket coming off the LCD due to metal fatigue. The LCD FFC board is screwed securely onto the MDF sticking out from the frame.

I'd love to extend the LCD controls all the way to the back of the box at some stage. I can't imagine sticking your hands into the box to turn the LCD on will be much fun. .

We have light!!!

It looks very green but I know it'll warm up eventually.

Also, is it normal to see the ambient light around the triplet on the left???

After a couple of hours the green dissapeared and I got a nice bright white light. I'm told this 150W CMH bulb really starts to shine after about 50hrs.

I put a peice of paper over the triplet and I can see the bulb pretty clearly. It's WAY out of alignment however! The whole unit needs more tweaking. I think i'm going to start from the bulb end and work my way forward.

Tip for beginners... Measure TWICE, cut ONCE....

Oh how I yearn for a table saw.

Good to see such great progress.

There is usually some spill of light outside the triplet, I think. Is it at the correct focal postion yet? If it has to go forward, the focussed light outside of it will get smaller, of course. Once you are focussed and your image is good, you can make an iris to block out the additional light. Some of the light transmitted through the lcd will be un-collimated random light from your light engine, so painting everything black or using black felt forward of the LCD will help with that. Ideally, the only light you want going through the triplet is the light coming back into focus after the lcd.

I was going to fully line my light engine with aluminium, but I have only done the backing plate. I figure the wood can afford to absorb some heat, and will paint it black too, to absorb even more heat and cut down on all that stray light that is not going through the collimator at the right angle to do what we need it to do.

I look forward to seeing your next chunk of progress. I've set a (probably unreachable) goal of finishing to the WAF design spec before 1 March so I can have it in the house to watch the Clipsal 500.

Dude, I've got a Triton 2000 in the shed, and I haven't touched it for this project. I'm trying to get it to WAF standard without even using the router. Possible, but might be too hard.

I've found I can be very accurate with my jigsaw and a roughcut blade. It tends to wander far more if I use a fine blade. Still, I have had to re-cut a few pieces...

Looking good Yak

I can really follow you on the tablesaw yearning...

Good work

PS. I've made some progress too, but my cam is out of the house so there's no way for me to document it

pps. I've incorporated both the 3M reflector & the Precondensor

/Martin