Dan’s Space on the Web

I’ve just been busy with moving into my new apartment back at Purdue. And with schoolwork and other things, of course.

I’ll continue posting semi-regular updates once I’m fully settled in and I find something worthy to talk about.

See you then.

Ok, maybe not that close, but at least half way..

Well, I’ve packed it all up now. This project is officially on hold until the next time I come back.

However, when I first entered the room yesterday with the intention of packing it up, I decided to give it one last shot. Working for a day to put the parts together as best as I can, I ended up having built a makeshift fortress-that-is-falling-apart-kinda-projector. Here are a couple of shots. Yes, those are a pair of black tshirts.. I needed something to stop the reflection around the LCD/fresnel sled.
 

I had worked on this for quite a bit, I wasn’t just going to pack it all up. So I put together the little mess you see above, connected my computer, held my breath, and flipped the switch. The light flickered on, and slowly got brighter. I watched the projection on the wall with hope that it will continue to get brighter until I got a nice LCD projection going. Alas, it was not meant to be, for the final resulting projection brightness/quality is way below what I was expecting. I took some shots, but they are not worth showing.

Here are some possible reasons for my failed attempt.

1. Plenty of light leaks. Though I tried covering up as much as I could, I couldn’t stop all the light from leaking.
2. Poor alignment and placement. I pretty much eyeballed everything, so the triplet, LCD/fresnel sled and lightbox all probably had their axes way off from each other’s.
3. Poor design of lightbox. I didn’t even plan my lightbox.. just stuck the lamp in the box and kept cutting the hole as I guessed would help improve the quality. Initially I kept getting one small bright rectangle of light in the center of the projection, so I cut the hole bigger to let more light out. This did work, but it reached a point where cutting the hole bigger didn’t increase the size of this “bright rectangle”. I think this is where I screwed the lightbox over, as the overall brightness started decreasing.

Yes, I did get the lightbox done. Well some kind of lightbox, anyway. As I just mentioned, it’s probably junked by now, and I’ll have to make a new one the next time I work on this. Here are some pictures:

Yeah.. I made it out of a biscuit container and an empty can of oats. I think my Mom was happy to know that she was able to supply me with something, although she had no idea I would be mutilating it like that. I also plopped a heatsink from an old processor on top. There’s actually a fan on top of it, but since I don’t have a DC adaptor lying around and I have no need for the crazy cooling at the moment, I took the fan off. Note: I needed to add on the extra can because the original container was a tad bit short.

Well, that’s it. Tomorrow being National Day, my relatives are coming over, so I had to clear out the room. Since I won’t be having much more time after tomorrow, I decided to just pack it up for good.

Ok then, it’s been a fun project.. can’t wait to be able to finish it up in a year’s time.