PROJECTS MODDING & TWEAKING

DIY LED Projector

Although an evening at the cinema can be a nice experience, there are a few drawbacks as well. You
can’t just pause the film if you need to nip to the toilet, and the seating isn’t always that comfortable. If
you’re really unlucky you could find yourself sharing the place with a horde of noisy kids who can’t keep
still. A home projector provides a good alternative: a nice big display, you can pause it when you want
and you can choose your own company. It’s a pity that the projector lamp wears out so quickly though...

There are certainly many advantages new ones no longer cost the earth. But, by many electronics hobbyists. Some
watching films at home. Invite a few and this is sometimes overlooked, they electronics shops and web stores stock
friends round, grab a few drinks and can be quite expensive to maintain. LEDs that leave incandescent lamps in
you’re bound to have an enjoyable The internal lamp has a lifespan of only the shade. Would it be possible to ac-
time. The main difference of course is a few thousand hours and can cost up quire an old projector and replace the
that whereas you have a huge screen to £300 to replace. This does turn it lamp with a set of ultra-bright LEDs?
in the cinema, most people only have into an expensive pastime when you This gives us all the advantages: a
a (relatively small) TV at home. And often watch a film. It makes you think projector that is quiet, doesn’t cost too
although those large LCD and plas- twice before you turn the projector on much and doesn’t need a replacement
ma screens are becoming more afford- to watch the news or play a computer lamp at regular intervals.
able, the larges ones are still outside game on the big screen.
the budget of most people. A recent development is the use of
LEDs instead of a lamp in some new
A little bit of theory
Another appliance that can produce a projectors. These last a lot longer and Before we get started on the project
large display in the home is the projec- have the added advantage that they we need to go over some theory first.
tor. Point it at a white wall or projector don’t run as hot so are likely to have How does the average consumer DLP
screen, connect it to a laptop or DVD less noisy fans for cooling the lamp. projector work? A DLP projector is built
player and there it is: a high-quality The disadvantage of these projectors round a Digital Mirror Device (DMD),
display well over a metre in size. is that not many of them are produced which is a chip with thousands of mi-
yet, and they are still quite expen- croscopically small, electronically ac-
sive. You won’t find one for under £500 tivated mirrors on its surface. Each
Costs (` 350) at the moment. mirror corresponds to one pixel. By ro-
Projectors aren’t very expensive to buy. In the last few years many improve- tating these mirrors an incident beam
You can easily get a second-hand one ments have been made in LED tech- of light can be passed on or blocked.
for under a few hundred pounds and nology. This has also been realised This does mean that pixels can only be

This is the projector we’ll modify. It is a fairly compact model, The removed, much too expensive, lamp that needs replacing This is where the lamp goes. At the bottom you can see one of
which unfortunately doesn’t have much spare room for our at the drop of a hat. the three fans that cool the lamp. The large circular opening
own circuits. goes to the colour wheel and light tunnel.

58 elektor - 3/2008
 L2 L3
* see text
* *
IC1
D2
*
+12V 7805 D4 ... D27 = Luxeon Rebel
L1
* R1
10k

7 1 2x
D3 * D4 D12 D20
T1 IRFZ48V
C1 C3 VCC RESET C6 C7 C8
C2
D1
D5 D13 D21
12 T2
2200M 100n 33M PD6 1M 1M 1M
16V 35V 35V 35V

1N4001 17
PB3
R2 R3

8x LED G
8x LED R

8x LED B
22k

22k
IC2

D11 D19 D27

COLORWHEEL ATmega88
SYNC T3
-PDIP 3x
R4
IRFZ48V
470 7 T4
BEAMER 14 PB0
PD4
6
R5
LAMP 15 PB1 5 T5
470 7 PD3
ON 16 4
PB2 PD2
R6
LAMP
470 7 23
ON PC0 R10
XTAL1 XTAL2 10k
8 9 10 22
X1
GND

R7 R8 R9 R11
C4 C5

0733
22k

22k

22k
1W
22p 22p
20 MHz

070690 - 11

Figure 1. The circuit is built around a MC, as is often the case. This controller also takes care of the boost conversion.

turned ‘on’ or ‘off’. The control electron- After the colour wheel come a light effect’. This effect can be seen when
ics can generate intermediate levels of tunnel, which consists of four mirrors you quickly look across the project-
brightness by driving the mirrors tens stuck together, creating a type of rec- ed image. Along the sides of the im-
of thousands of times per second. tangular ‘tunnel’ of mirrors. This con- age you’ll be able to see the primary
But you need more than just a DMD verges and homogenises the light. colours.
to make a projector. A large number of The light then goes through a lens It is of course perfectly possible to re-
other components are also required. that focuses the coloured light onto place the gas-discharge lamp with a
Normally, the light required for the the DMD. set of white LEDs, but there is a better
display is generated by an expensive The electronics controlling the DMD solution. If white LEDs are used, you
gas-discharge lamp. The light first keep track of the position of the colour would on average only use one third of
goes through a colour wheel. This is a wheel and adjust the positions of the the generated light. Each segment of
wheel with a number of colour filters, mirrors accordingly. The reflected light the colour wheel lets through light for
usually red, green and blue. The filters leaves the projector via a set of lenses just one of the three primary colours.
are put in front of the light source at a that focus the image onto the screen. This is rather impractical since LEDs
very high rate. Often this wheel turns This method has the disadvantage are already less bright than a 150-W
at 100 revolutions per second. that it causes the so-called ‘rainbow gas-discharge lamp.

The light travels from the lamp through the colour wheel The colour wheel. As can be seen, it consists of red, green and The detection PCB. The infrared LED and photodiode can’t be
(behind the small green PCB), through the light tunnel to the blue segments, plus a white segment for the brightness. At the told apart. However, the normally invisible infrared light from
lenses and mirrors in the black parts. The gold coloured DMD top right is the position detection PCB. the LED is picked up by the camera, so you can quickly see
chip is at the top right. which is which.

3/2008 - elektor 59
PROJECTS MODDING & TWEAKING

The Luxeon LEDs aren’t very big, as you can see. That comes in The cooling for the LEDs. The heat-spreader has been The LEDs have now bean stuck neatly to the Peltier element
handy since we need a small but intense light source. However, removed, exposing the Peltier element. This is where the LEDs using heat-conducting glue.
it does make the soldering trickier. will be mounted.

Fortunately we can get round this. We 700 mA at which point they’ll produce SMD packages, which have the con-
can simulate the colour wheel through 100 lumens of light. They’re not too nections on the underside. If they were
the use of separate red, green and blue expensive either. A set of 24 of these mounted on a metal heatsink it would
LEDs. In this way the light expected devices can be obtained for about £ 70 obviously produce short circuits.
by the DMD can be generated directly ( 55) that’s a total of 2400 lumens of Fortunately there is a simple solution.
by LEDs. You may now think that we raw LED power. When the metal plate of the heatsink
need three times as many LEDs for the is unscrewed we expose the Peltier
same light intensity, but this isn’t true. Since these LEDs are power devices element. On the outside this is made
Because the LEDs are on for only one they will generate much more heat from a non-conducting ceramic mate-
third of the time it is possible to in- than the usual 5 mm red indicator rial, which won’t cause short circuits.
crease the current through them by a LEDs. Worse still, if you don’t want the However, with the LEDs stuck down
factor of three. This method only works light output of the LEDs to drop they it does mean that we can no longer
for DLP projectors; there is no colour need to be cooled. As we didn’t know get at the connections. Luckily there
wheel inside LCD projectors so this exactly how much heat they’ll gener- are also two ‘tracks’ on the top of the
method wouldn’t work. ate and every degree warmer reduces LEDs. When the silicone protection
The project is now beginning to take the lifespan by a few hundred hours layer is scratched away they are eas-
shape: open the projector, take out the we decided on a solution that may be ily soldered to.
lamp, take out the colour wheel, put in considered overkill. From the overclock
the LEDs, program the microcontrol- world in computing we’ve obtained a Now for the connections. It is of course
ler with a colour wheel emulator and heatsink-fan-Peltier combination that is possible to connect a current-limiting
that’s it. This begs the question: can it meant for a Pentium 4 processor. This resistor to each individual LED, but
really be this simple? There is only one device can cool its surface below freez- this would require 24 resistors, which
way to find out and that is to try it. ing point and can dissipate up to 130 would all consume power and gener-
Watts of heat. Because they are mass- ate heat. A better solution is to connect
produced they’re not that expensive. all LEDs of the same colour in series.
Requirements They shouldn’t cost more than about This obviously requires a higher volt-
To get this project going we first need £ 20 ( 14) and you’ll also get a con- age, but the current needs to be lim-
a projector. After looking on the Inter- trol panel with a (reusable!) blue LCD ited in one place only. The LED chains
net we found a nice DLP projector: the display. are made by soldering thin wires onto
iPaq MP3800 made by Compaq, (now the top of the LEDs.
part of HP). This projector has the ad- And as we’re buying overclock prod- For testing the LEDs all chains are con-
vantage that it is very small and has ucts we’ll also buy two tubes of ‘ther- nected to a bench power supply via
a resolution of 1024×786 pixels, which mal adhesive’. This is a two-part glue a current limiting resistor. Take care
results in a very sharp picture. The that is good at conducting heat. It when switching them on, since two
critics found this projector too noisy is meant for sticking heatsinks onto thousand lumens is very bright!
and they weren’t too happy with the chips, but we’ll use it to stick the LEDs
lifespan of the lamp either, which could onto the heatsink.
be as little as 500 hours. In our case
Reverse engineering
this doesn’t matter. When the projector Now that we’ve taken care of the light-
is converted for use with LEDs as the
Now we begin ing we’ll have a closer look at the pro-
light source, these problems are effec- How can we turn all these parts into jector. With the side panel removed all
tively overcome. something that works? First we have to parts can be seen clearly: the remov-
Whilst we’re ordering things on the find out if we can make the LEDs pro- able lamp, the colour wheel, the light
Internet we may as well get the oth- duce the thousands of lumens they’re tunnel and the rest are easily distin-
er parts. The LEDs required are (red rated at. The LEDs have to be mounted guishable. It is noticeable that the
green and blue) Luxeon Rebels. These on a heatsink, otherwise they would lamp has to be cooled by three fans.
SMD LEDs, which have an area similar overheat. We immediately see that What do you mean, ‘noisy’?
to a matchstick head, can draw up to could be a problem: the LEDs come in To check that our idea works we have

60 elektor - 3/2008
The first half of the LEDs has been connected together using Only one half of the LEDs is connected and the camera can only The first test set-up: all LEDs are connected and a few
thin kynar wire. Never use superglue to hold the wiring in just cope with the light intensity. The first test is successful! quick-and-dirty supplies have been added. The cover prevents
place. Any repairs to loose wiring will then be made extremely unwanted light leakage.
difficult.

to remove the colour wheel and emu- To free up some space for the heat- replaced with an LED so we can see
late it in some way. The colour wheel sink and LEDs we have to remove the when the logic wants to turn on the
is typical of those found in projectors. fans. That immediately gives us an- lamp. The second is replaced with a
The motor used for turning the wheel other problem. Broken (or absent) fans (normally closed) push button so we
round is a stepper motor, although the mean that a non-modified projector can manually simulate the ‘all-clear’
feedback for determining the position could overheat and as such the pro- from the lamp logic.
of the wheel is done optically. There is jector will refuse to work. It is fortu- It’s now just a matter of connecting
a black mark on the wheel that is de- nately quite easy to fool the projector everything up and see if the concept
tected with an IR LED and a phototran- into thinking that the fans are present is valid. The heatsink with LEDs is put
sistor. This comes in very useful! When and working. All fans have a yellow inside the projector, the light tunnel,
we take the colour wheel out, all we wire that is pulled to ground when the which has been removed together with
need to do is emulate the signal that is fans are turning. All that needs to be the fans and colour wheel, is replaced
normally generated by the phototran- done is to ground that connection on with our own tin light tunnel. Connect
sistor and feed it to the DMD electron- the projector PCB and the electronics it up, turn on the projector and...
ics. A quick look on the ’scope shows will be happy. Wow, a picture!
that this is a 100 Hz signal, which The firmware needed a few tweaks be-
means that the colour wheel makes a The projector has another protection fore all the colours came out correct-
revolution every 10 ms. mechanism. Should the logic that ly, but we had a picture. It wasn’t as
drives the lamp not indicate within a bright as with the original lamp, but
It is very easy to program the colour few seconds that the lamp is lit proper- that was to be expected. Now for the
wheel emulation in a microcontroller. ly, the electronics refuses to work. This other parts.
Here we’ve made use of an ATMega88. signal can also be easily found. In this
Three MOSFETs are added to turn the projector the driver board for the lamp
chains of LEDs on and off. is galvanically isolated from the rest of
Power supply
Looking at the colour wheel you can the projector using two opto-couplers. Apart from the 12V for the fan and 5V
see that the first 2/7 is blue, then 2/7 One indicates that the lamp should be for the Peltier element, the projector
red, then 2/7 green and finally 1/7 white. turned on and the other returns the also required a supply for the LEDs,
It is a simple matter to write a program lamp status. These opto-couplers can which was provided by a bench power
that emulates this. be removed (desoldered). The first is supply. This would obviously need to

Advertisement

3/2008 - elektor 61
PROJECTS MODDING & TWEAKING

The capacitor bank may look a bit er. L1 is a suppression choke from the
strange at first. The reason for using junk box and C1 is a large electrolytic
three capacitors with smaller values is capacitor.
because of the Equivalent Series Resist- The large currents and losses in the
ance (ESR). A capacitor has an internal various components used in the boost
resistance that ‘normally’ doesn’t have converter mean that they have to be
much of an effect. But in this circuit the chosen with care. Both the MOSFETs
capacitors in the bank are charged and and the coils have to be able to cope
discharged tens of thousands of times with very large currents. Luckily it’s
a second with high currents. And then fairly easy to find high-current MOS-
the ESR certainly counts. A single ca- FETs. The IRFZ48V does the job well
pacitor would have to be scraped off and is widely available. Coils L2 and
the ceiling after a short while, as the L3 are more difficult to find. For the pro-
author knows from bitter experience, totype the author took two coils from
despite the fact that we’ve never ex- an old P4 motherboard. They consist of
This is what the inside of the projector finally looks like: the ceeded the voltage limit for the capac- three parallel windings of 1 mm2 c.s.a.
lamp, fans, colour wheel and light tunnel have been replaced itors. Connecting three capacitors in wire that has been wound round the
by the LEDs and associated parts.
parallel spreads the load and reduces toroidal core four times.
the total series resistance. For D2 and D3 in the prototype the au-
The total value of the capacitor bank thor used CTG24S ultra fast recovery
be replaced by a decent power supply shouldn’t be too large either. When diodes made by Sanken. They came
when the projector was put into nor- you switch between different coloured from an old power supply and come in
mal use outside the lab. In our case it LEDs with lower forward voltage drops a TO-220 package, which means they
would also increase the brightness of you don’t want the capacitor bank to are easily mounted on a heatsink. But
the projector. The bench power supply dump the excess voltage into the LEDs ordinary power Schottky diodes should
should provide 60 watts just for the from a high capacitive source. This also be suitable.
LEDs, which was more than what ours could even cause something or other And while we’re talking about heat-
could deliver. to blow up. A smaller bank has the dis- sinks, we would recommend that the
To keep everything fairly portable we advantage that it produces some ripple MOSFETs are also provided with small
added a powerful boost converter to the on the supply, but this is at a frequency heatsinks.
circuit (see Figure 1), which converts of several tens of kHz and won’t matter
the 12-V supply into a 2.1 A current when driving LEDs.
source for the LEDs. It has even been
The end result
implemented as a double boost convert- The supply voltage for the microcon- Is the idea viable and does it all work?
er. L2 and L3 are alternately ‘charged’ troller is set to 5.6 V using a 7805 and According to the author it does. This
via T1 and T2. D2 and D3 pass the cur- a diode. This is 0.1 V above the recom- LED modification is perfect for convert-
rent on to the capacitor bank, made by mended maximum supply voltage, but ing an old projector into a cheap ‘film-
C6 to C8. The ATMega88 measures the in practice it won’t be a problem. The viewer’. The area where you’re pro-
voltage across shunt resistor R11 to advantage of the slightly higher supply jecting does have to be quite dark, but
control the voltage across and current voltage is that the gates of the MOS- you’ll then have a good viewing expe-
through the LEDs. FETs can be driven a little bit harder. rience. To build this into a brand new
This way we can be certain that they projector is something we wouldn’t
are either hard on or hard off. With the recommend though.
level of currents that flow in this cir- Is there room for improvement? Possi-
cuit you’ll find that a partially conduct- bly. New developments are still made
ing MOSFET will quickly produce some in the world of LEDs. And every extra
smoke from the circuit. This is also the lumen that can be extracted from the
reason for the extra resistors from the LEDs gives a brighter picture.
gates of the de MOSFETs to ground. Furthermore, the optical system in
Without them, a problem that caused the experimental projector isn’t per-
the microcontroller to put its outputs fect. Not all of the light from the LEDs
into tri-state mode, could well cause reaches the DMD via the light tunnel.
the silicon of the MOSFETs to sponta- Improving this isn’t easy, however.
neously turn into its gaseous state. When the light is focussed too much
you’ll end up with coloured spots on
The LED driver circuit still requires the display. And optical components
about 100W. Added to this is the sup- are less easily obtainable than elec-
ply for the Peltier element. A cheap op- tronic parts.
tion is a standard ATX PC power sup- The firmware can be downloaded from
ply. This can usually supply over 10 A the Elektor website, and may be modi-
And this is what the completed project looks like. It does give at 12 V, whilst the 5 V output is suit- fied if you need to.
an untidy impression and the use of an ATX power supply able for the Peltier element. L1 and C1 (070690-I)
hasn’t helped to keep the size down. But it can be considered have been added to protect the supply
as a successful proof of concept, and if everything is mounted from interference caused by the peak Web Link
in a larger case nobody can see it. currents drawn by the boost convert- http://www.elektor.com

62 elektor - 3/2008