To update an old saying for the modern day, one man’s e-waste is another man’s bill of materials. Upcycling has always been in the hacker’s toolkit, and cellphones provide a wealth of resources for those bold enough to seize them. [Huy Vector] was bold enough, and transformed an old smartphone into a portable pico projector and an ASMR-style video. That’s what we call efficiency!
Kidding aside, the speech-free video embedded below absolutely gives enough info to copy along with [Huy Vector] even though he doesn’t say a word the whole time. You’ll need deft hands and a phone you really don’t care about, because one of the early steps is pulling the LCD apart to remove the back layers to shine an LED through. You’ll absolutely need an old phone for that, since that trick doesn’t apply to the OLED displays that most flagships have been rocking the past few years.
It looks like he’s specifying a 20 W LED (the bill of materials is in the description of the video on YouTube), so this projector won’t be super bright, but it will certainly be usable in darkened rooms. At least that lower wattage also means the batteries salvaged from an old power bank should give enough runtime to finish a movie… as long as it’s not the director’s cut, anyway. A heatsink and fan keep the LED from cooking itself and what’s left of the cell phone inside the foam board case.
The projected image looks surprisingly good considering the only optics in this thing are the LCD and the lens from a 5x magnifying glass from AliExpress. The foam board case, too, ends up looking surprisingly good once the textured vinyl wrap is applied. That’s a quick and easy way to get a nice looking prototype, if you don’t particularly need durability.
It’s not the brightest screen you can build, nor the highest resolution projector we’ve seen– but it might just be the easiest such build we’ve featured. As long as you handle the tricky LCD disassembly step, this is absolutely something we could see doing with children, which isn’t always the case on Hackaday.
At 3min07 he says a 50W LED cob. He’s got a small cooler and a 40mm (I think?) fan to cool it down.
Those who do not study optics are doomed to make crappy optics.
No condenser lenses, simple biconvex projection lens.
There’s no way on god’s green earth he can project that image with those optics.
I’m calling it faked, doin’ it for the clicks…
Sadly, this could work with a bit more attention to the engineering and a lot less to the video production.
I concur. The projection looks far too good for something created from using a roughly 30×30 cm emissive surface with hotspots as light source. The projection should show a lot of artifacts from that.
Yeah, there’s no way you can get a sharp projected image with a big array LED like that. And the inside of the box is white and reflective, that’s going to tank the contrast ratio. It’s also telling that there’s no shot of the finished unit projecting that image, just the projected image itself.
This is absolutely fake.
Calling BS on this one. There is no way the projection is without artifacts. only ONE lens is used. The apparent image is not inline with the wall dimensions.
Prol’y used a AI oderous S to stich a image and screen capture video.
Sad that people do BS just for views, and it is listed on HAD :(
heh, i thought the optics were too simple but i just shrugged and said seeing is believing :)