I’m currently very happy. And yes, I will write a real blog post soon. It’ll have chaos, misery, confusion and intruige, I promise.
I just got two broken projectors for free. This is so I can finally attempt my multitouch display project and have a go with some tangible interfaces. Of course, they were broken, hence the lovely £0 pricetag.
Exhibit A is a Sanyo PLC-SU20E, a fairly old but decent projector. It’s a solid workhorse, capable of 1300x760ish 16:9 resolution. I get it home, plug it in and watch- the projector turns on, strikes the bulb, then shuts down. A little Googling reveals that fan faults can trigger the PSU to shut down the projector, and sure enough a quick inspection of the back fans as I power it up shows one fan not spinning up.
At this point I got somewhat scared by leaning on everything too hard, then threw caution to the wind and gave it a good shove; voila, fan tray pops out, and fan is shown to be siezed up. A quick prod, and a screw falls out of the fan blades, after which the fan rotates freely. Slapped it all back together and it powers up, runs fine and looks great. £800+ of projector for half an hour’s work and £0.
So of course next step is the projector mount and frame for the multitouch table, along with the associated gubbins to make it all play nicely. We’ll have to see how well that all works out but it shouldn’t be hard. I’ll throw some pictures up sometime soon.
So how are you planning to use the multitouch surface without the shadow of your personage and / or hand getting in the way? Or are you going to do rear-projection or something? Or have I got this completely wrong?
Rear-projection. It’ll be projected onto the surface from behind (the surface will be an acrylic sheet with projection material on the back, ringed with infrared LEDs for FTIR).