HMD Project – Part 9

Tangents

The biggest flaw of this ‘mount projectors to your face’ plan of mine, I think, was my choice of projector, the Samsung really isn’t very good for this job, at all.  If you try a similar thing, do not choose this projector.

As previously mentioned, the controls are super sensitive, and take up an entire surface, which in itself is so very annoying for a project like this as to warrant using an alternative.  But to me, the two most gloriously horrible oversights are:

1) No image flipping features – As previously described, this means that the projectors can’t be mounted side by side, and means I had to change all the focal lengths of the lenses and generally piss about.

2) Not being able to use a tripod when the battery is not connected.  I was hoping to be able to use the tripod mounting hole as an easy and secure way of mounting the projectors to the optical coupling thingies, but, with the Samsungs, only the battery itself has a tripod mount.  Seriously – WTF?

Seeing as I am already elbow deep in this project, I may as well tear down (demolish) one of these Samsung SP-H03 projectors.  This is in the hope that, in bits, the unit is easier to mount, if I can separate the light engine from the controller board via an umbilical cable, then all the better!

Firstly off comes the bottom plate, you have to remove a couple of the rubber ‘feet’ to get to the little philips screws.

Samsung SP-H03

It’s pretty cramped in there!  I was hoping that the unit would then slide out of the casing, but, this thing was not designed to be user-serviceable!

The only way I could expose more of the fleshy electronic goodness was by ‘nibbling’ off bits of the plastic with some plyers.

Front of the Projector Exposed

Here you can see the primary heat sink for cooling the LEDs

On this side you can see the little rod which controls the position of the focusing lens

Here are the power and input connections

Much of the internals are made up of 2 fans, a host of heat sinks and a speaker.

Unplugging the fans and the speaker allows you to remove the main board.

Here you can see the main board, to which the light engines and input PCB's attach

Main Board Annotated

Once everything is unplugged the seperate boards can be laid out. On the next image you can see the light engine, mounted atop a heat sink, it has two boards connected to it, these boards are connected together and make up the controller for the light engine, I assume 😉

B Marks the connector to attach to the light engine

A marks the connection to the main board

A & B mark the points where the light engine and the main board attach to each other, the connector is a frighteningly high density 50 pin affair.

Here they are side by side

This is the connector on the main board to the light engine

This is the front of the connector from the light engine

This is the back of the connector from the light engine

I have no idea at this stage what that connector is, if it’s signals can be extended or if adapters to upsize it to something I could solder exist.

Anyone ?

So, with one of the Pico’s in bits, I can see that the light engine would be far easier to mount – and significantly lighter, if only I could find a method of extending that one connection….