BendDesk Multi-touch Furniture

December 3, 2010 by Mike Szczys 23 Comments

The BendDesk is a horizontal and a vertical multi-touch display connected as one curved surface. Think of it as a smart white-board and a multi-touch desk all in one. It can be used to sort and edit information, or to play games. Check out “Bend Invaders”, a game demonstrated in the video after the break. When you touch two fingers to the display the two points are used to aim a laser at the oncoming monsters.

The system uses a combination of two projectors shining on the surface from underneath and behind. A series of LEDs around the edges of the display bathe it in infrared light. Three cameras with IR filters peer at the underside of the acrylic surface and detect touches by distinguishing variances in the IR pattern through a process called Frustrated Total Internal Reflection. If you’re interested in more of the math and science involved there are a couple of papers available from the project site linked at the top of this post.

We’ve seen so many displays using the Kinect lately, it’s refreshing to see one that doesn’t.

Continue reading “BendDesk Multi-touch Furniture” →

Servicing An Epson Projector

October 28, 2010 by Mike Szczys 32 Comments

[Socket7] got his hands on a projector that had some color calibration problems. Of course the servicing manual says that there are no technician serviceable parts inside, but he cracked it open and fixed it anyway. This is an Epson PowerLite 5500c which was showing blue and yellow bands around the outside of the projected image. He could hear something rattling around inside which happened to be the lenses. It turns out there are foam pads that hold them in place that had shriveled over time. After a bit of careful work he replaced them and now has a working projector.

We’d love to have a projector of our own; there’s a lot of cool stuff you can do with them. Fixing a broken one is a great way to get one cheap, [Socket7’s] was free!

3D Printing With Visible Light

October 15, 2010 by Mike Szczys 14 Comments

This 3D printer manages some pretty fantastic resolution, and these are just the early results of [Junior Veloso’s] build. He put together a machine that prints objects in resin that cures in visible light. To print, a thin layer of raw liquid resin self-levels across a printing surface and a DLP-based projector shines light from below, onto the portion to be hardened. The z-axis then pulls that layer up and the next to be printed will become the newest bottom layer. Horizontally the printer yields 1024×768 resolution with a layer thickness as small as 0.01 mm. No wonder he’s turning out this kind of quality.

The model above took 5 hours to print, with eight-second exposure for each layer, and 0.1mm layer thickness. There is lots of good information on his blog, from the early planning, to the finished hardware so take some time to learn about this fascinating project.

Update: Thanks to reader [Nave.notnilc] for pointing out that we’ve seen a chemical 3D printing technique before.

Wii Sensor Bar Projector

September 16, 2010 by Mike Szczys 19 Comments

Having experienced quite a bit of trouble getting the Nintendo Wii remotes to work reliably with his home theater projector, [Sprite_TM] designed his own sensor bar replacement. If you’re not familiar, the Wii remotes have an infrared camera in the tip that sense two IR LEDs in the sensor bar that resides above or below your television. The problem is that if you’re too far away, the points of light are not where the remote expects them to be and the cursor will not perform as expected. Since this is a huge projected display it’s no surprise that the player is further away from the screen than the system was designed for.

[Sprite_TM’s] solution was to build a projection system for the two IR points. The unit in the picture above is a driver circuit with two IR emitters mounted on a heat sink, each with its own reflector. The reflected beams are shined through a Fresnel lens and projected on the same wall as the TV image. The viewer will not be able to see this light as it’s in a longer wavelength than the visible spectrum. But the Wii remote performs beautifully now and the replacement sensor bar is happily mounted out of sight above the projector.

Laser Marquee Projector

September 15, 2010 by Mike Szczys 22 Comments

This laser message scroller is built with inexpensive parts. The heart of [Raul’s] system is a spinning pill-box with eight mirrors on it. Each redirects the laser to a different vertical portion of the projection surface. There are eight small arms on the apparatus that each break the beam of an optical sensors as it spins, facilitating the precise synchronization needed to generate the projected image correctly. In the video after the break we can make out what looks like an Arduino controlling the system. This makes sense as it’s easy to connect the laser pointer and sensor, and the USB connection allows for the streaming of messages to the system.

Want to see a more complicated setup? Check out the POV laser projector from a few years back. Continue reading “Laser Marquee Projector” →

Another Home-built Laser Projector

August 22, 2010 by Mike Szczys 21 Comments

[Jarrod] sent us a link to this home-built laser projector after seeing a different projector that we featured yesterday. This system is fundamentally different. [ChaN], who finished the project several years ago, didn’t use a loudspeaker to move the mirrors, but instead build his own closed-loop Galvanometers. Two of these are controlled by an ATmega64 to produce incredibly clean and accurate vector images. It’s not just the images that are impressive, his hardware is laid-out with skill and forethought that make hiding it in a case a sacrilege.

Light Bulb Form-factor Computer

August 2, 2010 by Mike Szczys 21 Comments

This computer can be mounted in any standard light bulb socket. It uses a pico projector combined with a camera to generate a touch display wherever you shine it. The photo above and the video after the break show the bulb in a motorized lamp arm but that’s just smoke and mirrors, the bulb itself is the core concept. We think there’s real potential for home-built versions. We’ve seen touch displays similar to this that mount on the side of a laptop, but why have the computer around at all? Ditch the USB connection for wireless and have it connect to your home server for processing power. It becomes a perfect solution for places that aren’t traditionally computer friendly. For instance, that kitchen computer you don’t want to touch with dough-encrusted hands becomes washable when the display is projected on a cutting board. Continue reading “Light Bulb Form-factor Computer” →