what are you guys doing with the left over projectors?

[flecom]

to everyone ripping the diodes out of the Casio projectors, what are you doing with the rest of the projector?

I was thinking they would make a neat lighting effect if you just left them as red and "played" back beam show type stuff

anyone want to sell one?

[MechEng3]

Investigating that while relaxing this evening......

[danielbriggs]

The guts from all 6-7 of the projectors will be for sale in due course.
I plan to split the pass red + blue dichro's into 4; so there is more to go around.

I'm going to sort the diodes out first; then look at what's left and then deal with that...

[krazer]

Has anyone considered the possibility of retrofitting it with a traditional HID bulb and reverting it back to a 'normal' projector? The biggest challenge I see is the fact that the color wheel is wrong, so unless you want to go for black/white (which could be moderately useful...) it will require some very careful thinking in creating a color wheel that will give the proper color rotation.

If anything it is a good source for MEMS chips for people to play with Has anyone had any luck getting the beast to power up with the diodes or color wheel removed?

[danielbriggs]

It does NOT like running with any diodes removed. Not tried with colour wheel removed.
The projector gets rather upset...

[allthatwhichis]

I was actually thinking about taking everything but the blue lasers and lenses out to see what kind of blue beam I can get out of the projector...

[Ragnarok]

...and could any of those electronics be salvaged to drive diodes?

R.

[krazer]

I did some investigating, they are set over a serial buss (i2c it appears), and appear to have most of the pulse generation logic done in a microprocessor on board, so the chance of using them without modifications is pretty slim.

However, it does appear that the control signal to the power supplies is an analog signal internally, so it might be possible to hack them up to convince them to drive something else. They won't be fast (I wouldn't expect for them to work at more than 1KHz or so) and the blue drivers may have a hard time with low voltage loads (since they are designed to run at 30v, running them at 5v may throw off the feedback loops) but the red driver will work great for big laser diodes. I hope to investigate further sometime this summer.

[CRFultz]

I'm curious as to what you guys are doing with the left over diodes themselves. I ordered a projector from PCRush a couple days ago but I only need two of the diodes for my scanner. Although I haven't read anything here I'm kinda guessing that selling diodes on the forum may be frowned upon. I don't think I could sell my surplus diodes to someone not knowing for sure if they would end up in a pointer or not. I would rather pass them on to someone who needs them for a scanner and is responsible enough to know how to handle them safely. Hopefully someone here can send a msg to me in regards to the disposition of the xtra diodes I don't need.

Chuck

[mpoulton]

I'm curious as to what you guys are doing with the left over diodes themselves. I ordered a projector from PCRush a couple days ago but I only need two of the diodes for my scanner. Although I haven't read anything here I'm kinda guessing that selling diodes on the forum may be frowned upon. I don't think I could sell my surplus diodes to someone not knowing for sure if they would end up in a pointer or not. I would rather pass them on to someone who needs them for a scanner and is responsible enough to know how to handle them safely. Hopefully someone here can send a msg to me in regards to the disposition of the xtra diodes I don't need.

Chuck

At this point there's no need to buy a whole projector if you only want a few diodes. Plenty of people are now in the diode extraction business, myself included. They are consistently available on eBay. If you really feel the need to control the final use of your diodes, then selling on eBay is not an option - it's an open marketplace and you can't control what buyers do. I've bought and sold big IR diodes and surgical CW YAGs on eBay though, so to me these diodes seem much less dangerous.

You could just build a 20W knife edge setup! :-)