Good eyes. that's a Gazelle. Bought at Sams Club.

Our house is very homey. The media room is probably equal to one-third the overall size of the house. Looking forward to completing my projector in January. Sure glad I live here in central Texas. Going north just looks too cold for me.

Got the projector wired up tried a first projection. This is what you get when you are off by approximately 0.8 inches (lamp too close to the fresnel). Camera hand held, F2.8 for 1/2 second. Oh, the picture is set to be a little over 9 feet wide.

Moved lamp as far back as the adjustment range would allow - still about 0.6 inches too close. Same camera exposure. Now you can see the word pause easily.

Moved lamp and reflector back to the approxomately correct position. Same camera exposure. To the eyes, the picture looks really good. Other notes about the projector. The fans are way louder than their spec but they do keep the LCD quite cool - about 10 degrees above ambient.

Nice...

Yes, very nice results. Interesting choice of colors you have there....especially the blue projector. I'm just gonna paint my theater room a combination of flat black and a dark slate gray. Does your wall paint reflect much light?

I really have no problems with reflections from the walls or ceiling. The walls are really a dark maroon and the blue (both ceiling and projector) are a very dark blue. The paints are almost flat. I have black-out blinds on the windows so it is no problem to watch the projector in the day. A sixty watt bulb in the back of the room makes little change in the projected picture. 180 watts about twelve feet (three bulbs from one of the ceiling fans) from the screen is another matter. It almost completely washes out the projection. Direct sunlight if one of the blinds is open is also bad. I am happy that I can have a 6o watt bulb at the back of the room and feel like I am watching a good picture (and there is no lamp shade on the bulb at present.) I think the bright blue you see on the projector is an artifact of the flash when I took the picture. In person you see a very dark blue.

HDTV picture

Another HDTV

Regular TV - ad for spelling bee movie.

'Spellbound'
That was a great documentary. I was dreading watching it with my gf, but ended up loving it.

Holy cow, that room is looking amazing. Ya gotta match a big screen with big sound.

When can we all come over?

GENE

Picture of projector with room illuminated by camera flash. The flash didn't illuminate the front of the room where the screen is. The old 60" TV is just "behind" the projector in this picture.

The picture is amazingly clear considering it is a handheld 1/2 second exposure and the tv image is not paused.

you've been working on this a long time, good to see it up and running. ( Nice Pics!! ) how far away is the pj from the screen and what size is the projected image?

Hi Tescorp,

The front of the lens is approximately 12.5 ft from the wall. The screen is just under 9 feet wide. The projector has a 19" LCD inside.

Right now I'm looking for someone to weld a ceiling mount that I've designed. Hope to have the projector ceiling mounted by mid-July. Then we buy comfortable furniture for the wife. Then I think I will try Screen Goo for the projection screen.

Stratcat,

If you are ever planning on being in central Texas, give a holler. I'd be glad to show off the theater.

Chick

Cool, mine will be a little closer at 12 feet. so I will get just under nine feet which will be perfect. right now with the standard lens its 11 feet which is just too overwhelming for the room. well done on your build, its been a long time building.

This is a great set up! It looks like a ton of hard work! But the payoff is obviously there! Good to see a few people out there showing how to set up a home theater room. I skipped the how to and just showed the end product in my plog. I am sure this will be helpful to a lot of people out there. Pre planning is key to getting everything you want AND need. Congrats.
Bluto

favor smiled upon your endeavor

great work

awesome! I love ESLs and I'm actually thinking about making my own when I get some time you make me jealous

It's time to get to the ceiling mount.

This first picture is of my friend Ron bolting the mount to the ceiling. The mount consists of several pieces. First is the 2x6 that is lag screwed to three ceiling joists. Then comes the 2x4 that is lag screwed to the 2x6. On either end of the 2x4, an eye bolt is mounted into the 2x6 so the eye is flat against the 2x4. Next the arms that will attach to the projector are lag screwed through the eye bolt into the end of the 2x4. The assembly will be painted the same as the ceiling later.

Close up of the mount. Depending on the monitor, this picture comes close to showing how dark the blue of the ceiling is. It is a very dark blue.

First mount of the projector to the ceiling. Indeed, we came very close to finding the cg of the projector. The cg changes very dramatically if one of the lids is removed. Notice how the 2x4 is offset to the left on the 2x6. That is very wrong. It should have been offset by that amount to the right. The center of the screen is to the right of the middle ceiling joist beam. Anyway, the projection ends up going several inches beyond the right edge of the screen.

More of a side view of the mount. You can also see a little of the back of the projector.

A more wide angle view of the projector. As in the previous picture, you can see the chalk line that we snapped to be parallel to the screen and to the front edge of the 2x6.

On to other topics for the room. This picture shows 90 lbs of steel laid out waiting to be freed from the plastic wrapping and assembled into a 73" high 19" open rack.

Here's a picture of the rack assembled. Sorry, no pictures of any intermediate steps. I think I need to slide the rack in front of the screed to get a picture where the rack is more visible.

Now on to the HTPC that I'm assembling. I bought a Gigabye GA-M59SLI-S5 motherboard. It has silent pipe heatsinks. No fans on the chip set or the voltage regulators. I bought a Gigabyte GV-NX76T256D-RH GeForce 7600 GT Silent-pipe II video card. It has no fans either. (I make up for the lack of fans by having plenty in the rack case I bought, a Norco Technologies Inc. DS-600S Black Steel 4U Hot Swappable Rackmount Case 3 External 5.25" Drive Bays, six hot swappable SATA drive bays. I bought two 300 GB SATA drives, one 300 GB ultra ATA IDE drive, four 1GB DDR2 sticks of memory, a LaCie dual layer DVD+/-R/RW Lightscribe drive and an AMD 4000+ Athlon64 X2 dual core processor (jackhammer, i.e. each core has 1MB of L2 cache). No tuner card on order yet.

Here you see the mb mounted in the case. The 580 watt Hippa modular power supply is also mounted in the case. The six SATA drive bay sub-chassis came mounted in the Norco enclosure. I have removed the normal drive chassis on the right.

Here is a more detailed view of the motherboard. The heat-pipe heat sink are very obvious. The socket AM2 dual core Athlon64 is already mounted as are the four DIMMs. I note that the AM2 socket can support four core cpu's when AMD releases them-they're probably a year and a half off). You can see the two 16 bit, one 8 bit and and 1 bit PCIe sockets and the two PCI sockets. Also visible are the six SATA sockets and two easy-SATA sockets. That's right, without any add-in cards this mb can control 8 SATA hard drives.

Here's my last update for the night. Here everything is installed. The two SATA drives are in their carriers atop their subchassis. The ide drive is in the top 5.25" bay on the right. Below is the lightscribe DVD writer. Underneath it is the floppy with memory card reader....and underneath it is the 4 USB, mic, headphones and firewire adapter. Inside you can see the video card with its heat pipe arrangement makes it take up the space of the 8 bit PCIe slot. Oh well, can't have it all. Sorry about the photo being out of focus to the front and in focus at the back.

I remember paying a thousand dollars for a one gigabyte hard drive in the early 1990's. These 300 gig Maxtor SATA's cost me $79.98 each on sale at Fry's. It's hard to believe the price change in just twelve years.

19" rack for all the audio/video gear and the htpc. Way too many bolts in assembling this thing.

Projector mounted on ceiling. Straight line in front of mount is a chalk line to insure that the mount is parallel to the screen.

Projector on the ceiling with the mount painted from the screen position.

Here is the view through the bay window of the media room.

More or less the same view except the exposure is set to see the interior of the room.

Shelves for the rack, to be painted black.

Bracket detail to mount shelves.

HTPC formatting HD. The "Save-the-Back-Chair" stays. The rest of the seating goes. My wife thinks that I'm far enough along to order the furniture. So Saturday she ordered a couch with a chaise lounge on one end and a recliner on the other. It should be he in 6 to 8 weeks. We'll see. I also ordered the screen goo. It will be interesting to see the effect it has on the picture.

Shelves for the rack. One 4x8 sheet of plywood yielded 10 shelves. Five shelves are shown with one side painted.

View of the HTPC formatting the EIDE HD.

DIY OD!

Wow. That is one serious media room.
Can't wait for more.

great project...I am anxiously planning my own HT now.

Question for you... Could you give some of the dimensions that you are using as far asPJ locating goes...

1. The distance from the screen to the triplet

2. The dstance from the triptlet to the ceiling.

I ask becasue when I do these calculations I never come up with numbers that will work for a PJ mounted close to the ceiling. The keystone angles always come out huge...way more than the 15 degree maximum that I have read about. I am trying to get a finiished screen diagonal of around 120", or 8' width. Unless I am calculating incorrectly.

wow.
That looks absolutely amazing...

Can I have your computer? that things a boss hog!

Sorry for the delay. I work for AMD and we are preparing to start testing our first quad core processors (possibly as soon as this weekend) and work has been keeping me very busy.

Anyway, the front of the triplet is 127" from the center of the screen. The center of the triplet is 17" from the ceiling. Pro triplet with a 19" 1280x1034 pixel LCD.

I'll try to get pictures of the setup this weekend. My wife's couch arrived yesterday. Things progress although slowly.

Chick

Nice. Hey let me know how those quads work out. I'm sure you guys are scurrying to get your next processor out so you can be back on top of intel and their core2duo again.

Photo of the wife's new couch. The section on the right next to the nightstand is a recliner.

My chair. It has memory foam!

Here is the equipment rack. From bottom to top: Outlaw Audio 7 ch, 300W rms/ch power amp. Sony 400 cd changer. Outlaw Audio video preamp. Samsung combo VCR/DVD player. Viewsonic N6. Assembled AMD X2 PC with 900 GB of hard disk storage and 4 GB of RAM. Teac cassette deck. Toshiba VCR. Dish Network HD Satellite Receiver. To the right of the rack is an Outlaw Audio Sub-woofer system with built-in 300 W amp. The power amp in the bottom of the rack weighs just shy of 100 lbs. It was a real pain to lift it in its shipping carton to send off for repair-the thing has a five year warranty.

Looking to the left side of the room with the blackout blinds open. Nice view of our front yard.

Behind the rack looking at the video preamp.

Behind the rack. The preamp is partially connected. None of the component video cables have been hooked up yet.