|
In 2006 or so I did the same, building a projector out of a laptop LCD (without the laptop, just a plain LCD module and a controller), some lenses, a fresnel lens (cut in half, one part before and one after the LCD) and a 400 watts mercury vapor lamp usually intended to be used to light up factory halls. I constructed a housing for it from wood, a cooling system using lots of PC fans to vent that 400 watts of heat, and even a microcontroller-based control system for the entire thing, with a small LCD display, which managed stuff like tracking bulb used time, monitoring internal temperature via a temp sensor IC and letting the cooling system run for some time after turning off the lamp to get the heat out. That thing was heavy and loud as hell, and it wasn't very bright considering it used 400 watts of light power, but it was about half the price of an equivalent projector back then, which effectively allowed my poor student self back then to enter the home cinema scene, which I couldn't have afforded otherwise. There even was an entire little scene back then of DIY projector enthusiasts (at least in Germany) with bulletin boards and even some niche online shops specialized in selling suitable lenses and LCDs and matching controller boards. It was great fun and a great learning experience, especially since you could get help from like-minded people and ideas from other people's projector projects. A few years later it all quickly went down the drain when the first Full-HD projectors with acceptable quality dropped into price ranges that were affordable for the general public. It simply wasn't possible to compete with that anymore, neither in terms of quality nor in terms of price. I myself replaced my hunk of a self-made projector after about 4 years of use or so, with one of these entry-level full HD home cinema projectors (which I'm even still using today, so that was a really good investment in my book). But that self-made device was worth every cent and every hour of work, and I still have fond memories of building it and tweaking it for maximum quality and then watching movies with it, all the while thinking "man, I built that thing basically from scratch". |