Hello everyone. I'm new on the forums but I have always wanted to get into electronics and will be an active member on the forums I'm sure.
I have a big camping trip coming up in a few months and thought it would be great to bring a large movie projector to entertain everyone. Needless to say, those run about 400+ for a decent one.
So I thought about building one. I broke it down into a few parts:
The lens system: I could scrounge this or look on ebay for a cheap slide projector or something. Anything used to project a large image w/ focusing system would work.
The display & circuit: I have a idea here but I don't know if it would work. I have a old PDA with a decent color screen that I don't use. Its not super high resolution though. (3.5" TFT active matrix 16-bit (64K colors), 240 x 320) I'm guessing that res would not work around the 50"+ range. Does anyone know a resolution that would be recommended?
My Idea is to remove that screen down to the transparent glass. I'll build a super bright LED light source to put behind the screen. Reflect that on a few mirrors to the lens and project to the screen. Now hopefully I could get the video player built in the PDA to play the videos correctly, but I may have to make a circuit that takes RCA input video and outputs it to my own screen driver circuit to drive the PDA screen or a higher resolution screen. Any input on these ideas?
Thanks for any input!