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>> This episode of Systm is brought to you by GoDaddy.com, Dolby, and Netflix. Alright. The long promised DIY High Definition Projector show is here. I know, we've been promising this episode for a while but like all simple things or at least seemingly straightforward things, Murphy's law crapped in with a baseball bat wreaked havoc upon -- well, I agree, you know, of minor havoc like 4 or maybe 5 flat panels, a few hundred dollars in mail-order fees, a few days waiting for a storm to pass by a broken bulb. Well, you get the idea. The much-awaited DIY video projector coming up on today's episode of System.
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>> After many attempts and discarded LCD flat panels, we'll explain later, we finally have the makings of our DIY LCD projector and it's gonna be high def like 1080P. Along the way, we actually picked up some help. I picked up some help in the shape of Mr. David Calkins. You may remember David from a robot episode. In fact, you've probably never seen him without a robot. We say that he was so helpful and so much fun and so good in the machine shop that we dragged him along in everything else we're doing. So I'd like to officially welcome Dave to the System team. You're a new co-host.
>> Thank you sir.
>> You've lost that bet and you're gonna be here--
[ Simultaneous Talking ]
>> Long time. So before we wanna -- where do you wanna start buddy?
>> Let's start with our do-it-yourself LCD panel which can project your video games rather than on a dumb little screen this big, about 10-foot screen on your wall.
>> And it's a pretty interesting concept right? Much people out in the internets figured out that you take the guts of a flat panel, generally like a desktop -- desktop LCD flat panel, strip it, and then you end up with a flat panel without the backlight and you can put a big giant lamp behind it as bright as the sun or at least a lot by what you wanna use in your house normally. And turn that with the help of some other stuff into a projector, 400 watts, 65K which means basically it is a sunlight in a giant contraption. And this thing will give you 20,000 hours of life which is epic in the projector world and it's gonna cost you like 25 or 50 bucks which is a lot less--
>> Better than 2 or 300 dollars that will cost for your replacement bulb for one of the projectors which we buy.
>> Exactly, and once you point out right now, we got a lot of help and assistance from lumenlab.com which they sell kits and actually they have some pretty amazing robotic CNC milling kits on the way but they basically give you a kit for about building up projector. And this is not a kit like a complete collection of parts that you painted and put together and end up with a model car. This is like core components of a projector, a DIY projector that you're not gonna find in your local hardware store. You're gonna need to provide separate from the kit in LCD flat panel in wood and a lot of patience.
>> One of the cool things that Lumenlab provides for you is an online tool which will allow you to calibrate how far the front Fresnel lens is from the LCD panel, how far the LCD panel is from the final projection lens, how big you want your final projection screen to be, and all of these things.
>> Yeah, 'cause once you get really clever, this is essentially a fix focused projector designed to be a single specific distance from the screen. You're pretty much gonna have to puzzle up everything inside your projector box with the help of the fabulous free lumenlab guide which is a giant PDF that walks you through all of the various component tree. So, shall we talk about the rest of parts in the kit?
>> Sure. One of the things is this big thing here is not actually the main power supply but this is the ballast for the lamp. And the ballast is not something that keeps the boat afloat. No, the ballast is something that powers just the lamp because it takes so much power and you have to have very clean power to prevent the lamp from flickering and causing other distractions to your giant video game screen.
>> That would be bad.
>> That would be bad. You also have a fan, you finally have a fan.
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah.
>> I always wanted one of those.
>> Always wanted one of those. Power supply is two Fresnel lenses, one to focus the light on the LCD flat panel, one to focus the light on the triplets.
>> Which is also included?
>> Yeah. And the triplets basically would focus these things on the wall.
>> So called because it's actually got three different lenses inside of it.
>> So cool actually to see that. One of this we should definitely say right now is amass your parts especially your flat panel first then you will have the ability to measure and plan everything out because if you say waiting for another source of junk 15-inch flat panel or waiting for mail ordering of flat panels, you need the final measurements off of it, you really can't do anything else until it shows up. So that and also--
>> Because the width of the flat panel isn't necessarily going to be the same with as the Fresnel lenses. So in our case, our flat panel is actually an inch longer than our Fresnel lenses which basically means that we're gonna lose -- we're gonna clip a little bit side to side in terms of the final screen resolution.
>> Which to point out that was more of an error between the keyboard and the chair that it was natural error or anything else involved.
>> Okay. The problem is just between keyboard and user.
>> On that bright and cheerful note to the workshop.
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>> So to keep our flat panel low, one of the things we're gonna do is we're going to slant the size of the box. What that means this basically is if you want to change something or install something, we just--
>> Slide it in.
>> Now, the depth of each slot is gonna be different based on the length of your Fresnel lenses, your polycarbonate, and your LCD panel. So basically you have to figure out which is the longest of those and which is the shortest of those, and make sure that half the distance between them is long enough to slide into your piece of wood.
>> That's how to get this side -- the height of the side of the box.
>> Yes.
>> At least at its widest points.
>> At least at its widest points.
>> 'Cause you're doing like a coffin box basically they send you a coffin box, you see you got the area with the Fresnel lenses and the flat panel as the huge part and it tapers toward the triplet and it tapers towards the light source.
>> Now, if you just wanna make a box quick and dirty, you can make a box. You can absolutely just make this box.
>> That's what we're doing.
>> But if you wanna taper it and make it look really cool and you wanna do coffin box, on Lumenlabs website, there's this really gorgeous curve boxes that you can't even imagine how they got the lamination to curve like that.
>> CNC.
>> All sorts of different things you can do.
>> Shopperbox.
>> Yeah, it depends on how much work you wanna do versus how pretty you wanna do it.
>> We're definitely well in the quick and dirty stage at these points.
>> Dirty.
>> Dirty.
>> Dirty.
>> Simple.
>> Simple.
>> We made a pretty layer.
>> We're gonna make a pretty layer. But first, we have a slot so we figure out all of our calculations based on the materials that we have both Fresnel lenses, the polycarbonate which happens to be exact same size and shape as the panels and the LCD panel display. Now the problem with the LCD panel display is it's both an inch wider from the Fresnel lenses but it's also almost three times as thick. This is a problem more so for all particular installation. Your mileage is definitely gonna vary at this point.
>> If you're very lucky, they might all be 1/8 of an inch thick, in which case, all of your cuts are gonna be exactly the same. We're not lucky.
>> Wow.
>> First thing we're gonna do is a test cut and we brought this up to what we believe to be an eight of an inch.
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>> And we happened to have our calipers here. If you don't have the calipers, you can do this other ways. You can stick it in a piece of paper and bend over the piece of paper and then measure that piece of paper. You can try and measure it on the side using your wood but in this case, basically, we are looking to be [inaudible] sixteenth of an inch to the--
>> So just downward, just a [inaudible] just a bit, I'm gonna take my pen. We know this is a bad depth so we don't wanna measure that one again. So I'm gonna cross that one off. We're gonna do another test cut.
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>> And now, we know that we're measuring the right cut.
>> Dirty.
>> Dirty yeah.
>> Yeah.
>> So now we got our blade set for a cut and now we're gonna -- what's this one?
>> I have no idea [laughs].
>> Now we're gonna reference our paperwork because you always wanna make sure that you're cutting the right size piece of wood. We've already cut the lengths. Now the nice thing about the wood, the two sides, is they're going to be mirror images. So rather than first cutting the--
>> That's the two sides of our box.
>> Yes, the two sides of our box.
>> The left and right side.
>> The left and right side of the box.
>> Okay.
>> So instead of cutting two separate sides, what we'll do is first we'll cut down both sides and we'll cut that piece in halves so that we're guaranteed that they are exact mirror images.
>> It's pretty clever. I don't know how it's goork but it sounds pretty clever.
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>> So we know that we want to start 20 feet back 'cause after you're gone for the night on a happier plane trip, I'm gonna make a coffin box in the front of this.
>> You're so cool.
>> I'm so cool. And so we're gonna go 20 centimeters back or 2 centimeters, 20 millimeters back from the front of the box to the first Fresnel lens, okay.
>> Uhmm.
>> And then from there and again the Lumenlab software gives us all of the distance based on what our final presentation wants to be.
>> 'Cause you're basically playing with the focal length 'cause you're not--
>> [Inaudible].
>> Want the focal length to be directly in the center of the triplet, you want a little forward of the triplet, you take advantage of as much of the triplet lens to--
>> Based on your room size.
>> Right.
>> So if your room -- if you want that projection screen to be 20 feet away from the projector and you got a huge thing, you're gonna make a bigger box. We're gonna get a bigger boat.
>> We need a bigger box.
>> Need a bigger box.
>> Place a longer box.
>> A longer box. So basically, you just figure out really where you want your projector and how big the screen you want, how much distance there is between them.
>> And then you do the math actually then you go to the focal [inaudible].
>> Yeah focal [inaudible].
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>> Let's take a moment to thank one of our sponsors, GoDaddy.com. You got a domain, you can transfer your domain, you GoDaddy for as little as 6 dollars and 99 cents and get a free one year extension plus guaranteed renewal pricing. Why do you care 'cause some other competitors are jacking the prices up. Think 35 bucks for a single year. Forget about that. GoDaddy makes the transferring easy and offers a ton of extras including hosting a five-page site builder, complete email, total DNS control, and quite a bit more for as little as 6 dollars and 99 cents. Plus GoDaddy recently started registering dot CA domain names. So our Canadian brethren, well, can get it on the GoDaddy lifestyle. And if you're entering code 6-6 when you check out, you're gonna save an additional 20 percent, I mean 12 for 24 month hosting plan. Some restrictions do apply. Do us a favor, check the site for details and get your piece in the internet at GoDaddy.com. Please support us by supporting our sponsors.
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>> We have Fresnel. We have LCD. We have Fernel -- Fresnel, and we have our polycarb which is marketed under the trade names of Lexan and Makrolon. There is no difference any more so than there is between Tylenol and generic acetaminophen. There is however a really big difference between what basically amounts to the fronts and the back of the Lexan. The Lexan, when you purchase it, it's gonna be a giant, much on the labeling on it and a bunch of security, you know, instructions and like 72 languages. What you care about though is finding out which side is supposed to be facing the sun because one of the things you wanna do is usually UV projection built into this to help protect the lens and also because it's designed to be facing towards the light, so 400-watt lamp sunlight facing section or sunlight facing the side of your Lexan. That's important.
>> Polycarbonate has a very interesting property. It is extremely strong this way but not very strong this way. So in robot combat, we have seen this on many occasions where big 340-pound robots will go flying and the Lexan will hit it here or big chunks of robot that have been broken off 340-pound robots. We'll hit it here, it will bounce off, it will leave a little scratch there and the audience on the other side of the polycarbonate is perfectly safe. However, any compression in this way can shatter the Lexan, which fortunately for us, also means that it's very easy to cut. So basically any kind of band saw, table saw, circulate saw, even hand saw can cut Lexan going this way. So it actually cuts easier than wood. It's a funny thing.
>> One of the very nice things about Lexan is with the length, the thickness you're probably working with which is most likely gonna be eighth of an inch, pretty fabulous XL-10, 'cause you're gonna basically just subscribe it over and over again with a knife blade. You're basic box cut it with a fresh blade in it. And once you've gotten it deep enough, put it on the table edge and I haven't gotten it deep enough or else it would crack in a nice clean line.
>> So I've also measured our LCD panel which unlike our Fresnel lenses and polycarbonate is not 1/8 of an inch thick. But with the LCD holder, it's a quarter of an inch thick. So we're actually gonna have to make two passes with the blade to cover its width not to mention a deeper path to cover its depth. So now that I've got my [inaudible] I'm gonna use my straight edge here to mark the sides 'cause this is how we're gonna come in. We're actually not gonna be able to see the markings since it's gonna be upside down at the time. So once this is all done, we'll have nice cuts all the way down and then we'll cut it in half so that we can fold it over and both of these sides will be inside it's just that the middle portion here will end up being the top, and so this will be the bottom, the top at the top and the bottom once it's cut in half. And then the light bulb will sit back here.
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>> I'm trying to slot 'cause we have to make sure this is not actually--
>> Is it gonna slot?
>> We don't slant -- we don't slot with the paper. We actually slot it without the paper so we have to peel the paper off to make sure that it slot perfectly and gives us what we call a press fit. And what a press fit is, is you don't have to worry about glue. It's in there just nice and tight and it's not gonna fall out. So I'm just gonna pretend that this is actually vertical and we're gonna do a test of our slot. And we can see that the Lexan pulls in nice and tight and it's now in there and so now the--
>> Shouldn't it be like run it through the entire slot beam?
>> Dude like totally. And it does actually take a little bit of effort to pull it all the way through the whole slot.
>> Sounds silly but it's always good.
>> Sound silly but it's always good to check. If it was too loose of a fit, once the entire piece was assembled, you might have to worry about the Lexan popping out and then ruining everything. If it's too tight of a fit, you might have to worry about it not fitting in there at all.
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>> Excellent. And we can see by using the guide, we now have three very nice, very parallel cuts to slots our for Fresnel lens, our other Fresnel lens and our polycarb. And now, slot is [inaudible].
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>> Joy.
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>> And sometimes they -- for whatever reason, the slot is better than others.
>> Huh, we have some of the plastic caught in there.
>> Oh, well, yeah. And it can catch plastic in there. This is really tight. And so now we have to adjust our final cut to one-half inch plus 1/8 inch is 4/8 plus 1/8 is 5/8.
>> Dum dum dum.
>> So now, we bring the blade up.
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>> So now it's just our -- oh so precious LCD monitor. And it fits in there. I don't really wanna push it too hard.
>> Where's your sense with Venture Lab?
>> And so the short answer is that it's gonna fit almost perfect because it's so fragile. I only wanna slot it in once. Shall we dance?
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>> And so now, we have a perfect inside, they're perfectly matched so we don't have to worry about anything being off angle. Okay, since we've just cut this as a single piece. So now what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna raise up the blade and I'm gonna cut this exactly in half and then we'll fold them over and made them that way. And in cutting this piece of wood, we'd actually taken into account the depth of the blade, so this piece of wood is actually a little bit -- we want it -- we want two 12-inch pieces but this piece of wood is actually cut to 24 and an 8th. So now, you don't even need to use this because our table saw -- so Patrick is gonna measure that out to 12th and a 16th. And in theory, drum roll please, we should have two exactly matched.
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>> So now, I'm gonna put this together you can see that they're gonna slot.
>> Yehey.
>> Yehey.
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>> Say we want to thank one of the sponsors of this episode of System, Dolby. Think about it folks, audio is more than half the digital entertainment experience, from the rumbling bass to the [inaudible] around your head, surround sound puts you in the center of the action. It is an integral part of digital entertainment. And Dolby and its technologies power the world's most popular and innovative entertainment products. And Dolby continues to innovate and lead in audio and has expanded its portfolio to include new video technologies to address the total entertainment experience with 3D Digital Cinema, high dynamic range of video and on the go for mobile and portables. So do yourself a favor and make Dolby an essential part of your home theater experience when you purchase any new digital or high-definition entertainment product.
>> Guess what the guys at Hak5 are now part of Revision 3. I wonder when we'll get the 4. Anyhow, their first episode with us begins midnight Eastern Monday September 8th and they do get another episode on Wednesday at its regular release time. That's Wednesday at 12 PM. Eastern, 9 AM Pacific. So if you want the latest in hacking everything from your cellphone to your house, definitely check out the Hak5, you should love it.
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>> For every giant pile of discarded monitor parts? Some of these are usable, some of these aren't. These little guys, these are the example of a monitor, you would not be able to use because the edge connectors which are these fragile little puppies that connect to the top and bottom of the monitor, in this case, can not be folded back unless you can basically create a ribbon that'll go from here down to here back here and over here which most people can't. Disassembly or stripping of the flat panel just takes patience. You wanna be really, really careful with the edge connectors, they come off easy and once they detach the flat panel is useless. The backlight just basically drops right off and you got your flat panel. So your buttons are feeding in to your video processing unit here. The powers coming off with this port over here which is great. In some cases, we've seen two separate video processing boards in the back of a flat panel or a giant set of electronics connected to control buttons. Basically, they keep an idea of everything on how it goes together so you don't lose any of that, taking pictures as you just assemble things. They can be super, super helpful if later on you're trying to figure out which really bizarre ribbon connector goes to which really bizarre ribbon connectors somewhere else 'cause once in awhile you end up with a board with a bunch of really similar looking ribbon connectors and that is incredibly frustrating. And by the way, if you don't check the -- we've actually guaranteed and made sure that it actually works lists of flat panels up on the web site. You have the potential of buying 02 or 3 or 4 monitors that won't actually work because of the way they're constructed which can get expensive after awhile even with junk 15-inch flat panels [inaudible].
>> So one of the things I'm doing is I've got these little blocks, these half-inch blocks and because the lamp bulb is so hot and produces so much heat, it would melt all of the Fresnel lenses and it would destroy the LCD lens. So what we're doing is first we've got this polycarbonate in here to put -- help to protect them but we're also having an air gaps. So back here on what will be the back of the projection box, there's gonna be a fan. And the fan is going to blow cool air in but that cool air needs to escape and so we've got here is an air gap as what happens when the polycarb is in here 'cause now, we've got this air gap and I'm just doing this. This is sort of test fit so that we can see how things go together. This isn't even actually the polycarb sheet I'll be using. We're gonna get so much dust and fill from this polycarb sheet that would be worthless. So basically we got this test sheet in here now so we can mock up this one before we put in the final one. And so now, what -- what you see here is my fingers can come through and basically that gives us a half an inch air gap. And that half inch air gap will allow the air blowing across to be pushed out or pulled in depending on which way we run fan. And then up here towards the top of the final projection box, we'll also have holes drilled in here. So basically we can conduct air all the way through and keep everything nice and cool. If you're standing right behind the projector you're going to be hot but you don't have to worry about the Fresnel lenses or the LCD screen melting.
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>> So now we know that the height of our LCD panel is 8 and 3 quarter inches tall. I'm gonna be showing this to be about 4 and 3/8, so it's exactly the half height of our LCD panel, which is good. And one thing you wanna be careful about when you get your kit and your Fresnel lenses is that you want to keep them in a little plastic safety bags that they come in and I mean you don't want to play with them because if you look, these are now covered in dust and fingerprints, saw dust, all sort of generalized crap. And the problem with that is, is that's gonna be reflected on our end screen when we're done with the project. So now we have to spend an indoor amount of time here at the workshop late at night cleaning the Fresnel lenses because, you know, Patrick and I are two kids in a candy shop, [inaudible] and so we take them out and look and play with them and do dopy things which can cost us a lot of time. So when you get your Fresnel lenses, just leave them alone. I know it's a cool play but it takes a long time to clean.
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>> So you get two Fresnel lenses with your kit and unfortunately they're not marked. And so as soon you take them out, they look the same. It would be nice if the people at Lumenlab who send this out actually put like a little red stripe -- red marker stripe on one of them consistently so you could always know the difference. So what it tells you is that they have different focal lengths of 22 centimeters and 33 centimeters. So the only way to find this out is we use this as our object and 22 centimeters, I'll go up to 33.
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>> So at 22 centimeters
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>> 22 centimeters, this one seems to focus, so that should be our 22 centimeters which means that this one at 33, focuses. So we now know that this is our 33 centimeter focal length Fresnel lens. And following my own good advice, I'm now gonna take a marker, I'm gonna strafe the 3-centimeter lens just for my own purposes so I always know which is which. And now because of our handy little slots, you will notice how easy assembly is. We just drop in and we're done.
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>> So what we have to do is we have to cut out all of this area right here in order to make our LCD panel adaptor fit. And that's gonna take a bit of work because we don't have a mill. Normally what you would have is a mill and what a mill does, is mill -- it's kind of like a drill press except that the bid is flat instead of pointed at the end and then with the mill you have a table and so you're soododoodo and get rid of the parts you don't want. We don't have that. So it's gonna be a little bit extra difficult. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna sort of [inaudible] this with our table saw, and just as I cut out the screws with the table saw, I'm gonna cut out more grooves. It's just that I'm just gonna cut out grooves right here, okay in lieu of using a mill. And hopefully, because we've come right down to the veneer with our really deep groove for our LCD panel, hopefully, we won't break the actual final veneer of the wood. And for those who are curious why we did this, it's mostly because we could only find 3 quarter-inch board rather than 1-inch thick board and again one of the critical points of making your own LCD monitor at home is trying to get Fresnel lenses and LCD monitors of the same width. And unfortunately, we couldn't do that so you can actually see the full half-inch distance difference between the width of the Fresnel lens and the width of the LCD panel.
[ Music ]
>> Alright, let's take a moment for our Netflix sponsored movie pick of the week. This week, ah, a personal favorite, Pump Up the Volume starring '80s onscreen heartthrob, who's back on the little screen, teen rebel Christian Slater when he was a teen rebel. Pump Up The Volume tells us the hell of this effective teen loner Mark Hunter who end his frustrations by running a pirate radio station at night under the handle, well, I'm not gonna say it right here. This broadcast eventually spurs a social movement in his local high school and quite the conflict with the FCC and he did it all with the sudden irony in a dream and the AM radio gets his parents bought up. Improbable, yes, but if you haven't seen this movie, you're missing out on a fun one including Samantha Mathis looking quite fabulous. So add it up to your Netflix cue. And do yourself a favor, don't forget to check out the other hundred thousand titles Netflix has to offer including what we bet is a bigger selection of Blue Ray Discs that you're gonna find in your local video shop. Plus, with almost 40 shipping centers nationwide, almost all deliveries happen in a single business day, shipping three, both ways. Plan starts at 4 dollars and 99 cents. For you System viewers, we gotta hook up for you a free trial by signing up today at www.netflix.com/system, support the system by supporting our sponsors.
[ Music ]
>> So what you can see, I've done here because we needed that extra space for our control panel driver. I have just basically started out. You can actually see up close all the cuts here that have gotten into it. [Inaudible] but you can basically see, it's that just one cut at a time, and you keep doing it until -- back here it's actually pretty smooth. And so back here is smooth enough but now that the electronics will actually in this slot going back, so now I'm just have to do with the other board and now we'll have a little extra here. And that will give us a little extra venting space to pull more air through it which will help cool down the bulb and cool down the air. So it does have an added benefit. So basically, we can see Roger's computer monitor in the background. So basically I now know that the front end of this box is gonna be another 11 inches versus probably dead on what our actual final estimate was just despite me, there's just 12 inches. Always trust your measurements 'cause usually they're actually right. So now all we have to do is build the rest of the box and make it go. So now we know all of the dynamics of how the box works and getting all of our lenses positions correcting, and we know that, you know, how the electronics work and everything goes together. We're gonna assemble the final box and in doing so, we want it to look nice. We don't want it to be just functional. We want it to look pretty. So what we're using is we're using what are called double cuts. And what a double cut is, it's a 90 degree -- there is a 45-degree cut like that so that when we assemble our box, all the corners come together in a very nice, pleasant appearance, like that. If you don't do something like a double cut when you put your box together, that looks something like this. And as you can see, I mean, it's functional but it's not gonna look as good. So basically right now, we've turned the angle on the saw to 45 degrees and now we're just trimming out all these boards so we put them together, it'll look just as good in the box as it does on the wall. And as always, you just save the glasses.
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[ Drill Noise ]
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>> And so, this will be the back plate for the box where the fan exhaust will come and all the buttons and the electronics will go. But it will still look nice when it's all assembled, and it's nice and flash like that. And it's just one of those things where you don't have to do this by any means but it does look a little bit better. The other point about assembling our box is in making it look pretty. If we drill holes and put screws on the outside, well then you're gonna have this big ugly screws showing through. And to make it look a little bit nicer, what I'm actually gonna do is use this mounting blocks. And so we're gonna screw everything together from the inside with these mounting blocks. So basically what you do is you put one screw through this way and then another one through this way and in that way, you won't see any screws from the outside. It will just make the box look a little bit better. It would be kind of pointless to spend all the time mounting the screws from the inside if we drill all the way through and then you have a big gaping hole there. So one of the things I'm gonna do in placing my bit on, one or two things, if you happen to have what's called a bit stop which is a little cold that fits over the bit then you tighten it down, that will stop it. In our case, the bit is small enough that we can actually just measure it out in terms of the distance through and then when the actual head of the bit or the head of the drill goes to the end of the box there, that's our actual effective bit stop. And so this way, when I'm drilling my pilot holes from my screws -- so this way when I'm drilling my pilot holes for my screws, we can actually see that it's not gonna go, it's gonna go almost to the opposite side but not quite so that will give us nice pilot holes so that the screws go in much more easily but they don't actually go all the way out. And, of course, we're using screws that are just a little bit shorter than the distance of our mounting blocks and the actual mounting wood. So the final piece to mounting everything is the actual triplet lens. So we have to mount this into our wood. How do we do that? Well, we'll use what's called a hole cutter and what you basically do is you figure out where your center point is and you draw little red lines for your center point. You draw a tiny little hole through there which is your guide hole and then using the hole cutter, we cut a hole and then in this case, we happened to be using a two and a half inch diameter hole cutter, two and three quarters, excuse me, which is the same diameter as this and on this triplet will then slot right in there. And if you notice, this is fairly deep so now we can actually use that as a focal point as well.
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[ Drill Noise ]
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>> One thing to remember when working with wood is it creates a lot of sawdust. You are also working with optics which don't like sawdust. So before I'm gonna test fit the actual triplet in there, I'm gonna make sure this is good and clean of all the sawdust otherwise it's gonna get in the triplet. And then when you're watching movies or your video games, you're gonna have a lot of what looks like fuzz but is in fact dust.
[ Noise ]
>> You can see how much duster is on that. You have a nice-fitting lens mount. And now, put everything together.
>> And now we finish our projector. Now that I'm finally done with all the hard work, Patrick has rejoined us. What you see in the final and as we have a very tall screen here and in fact, we brought the projector closer to the wall just to help let you see all of these. Otherwise, we'd be too blown out. It is a lot of hard work to put this together. It costs us about 500 dollars just for the LCD monitor. So if you want a 1080P wide screen projector, you know, this is a cheaper way of going about it. If you're willing to go with, you know, a lower resolution, you're honestly better off just buying your own projector. But for a 1080P projector that can give us, you know, I mean we can push this back and make this a 20-foot long screen. You know, you can't beat the price but it is gonna take you a couple of weekends to do that in home and it is gonna be -- it's a pain in the butt. It's not easy. And you might go through 4 projectors trying to do that.
>> Hopefully not. One of the things we learned obviously, is check the projector list first. They do have a pro kit, right, the pro kit comes with basically comes with a Fresnel lenses big enough to work with 19-inch flat panel monitors which means you could buy like a 200-dollar monitor if you can find one on this works, LCD list, you could work with basically a much larger box and spend a lot less money on basically the LCD. But then, you're gonna spend a lot more money on the lenses. So it ends up being probably around 7 or 800 bucks in parts and wood, and we weren't even gonna try to estimate the amount of time in having to this at this point.
>> And part of that is just a failure rate of making something it doesn't work and then having to remake it. So in the end, you know, there are those people who like to do it yourself even if you aren't saving any money. So it is a good -- it's an interesting kit. It's interesting thing to do and it does give you a giant screen. If you're doing this at home, you will absolutely need to do this in a dark room. None of these projectors are gonna work in a fully-sunlit room. It's just not gonna happen.
>> Right.
>> So you're gonna have to be in a dark room with a big silver screen.
>> That said.
>> That said. Let's go back to the studio.
>> Alright.
>> Alright, that's it for this episode. We'd like to thank you for sticking for us and this project. Until next time. You've been watching Systm.
>> And no matter how much Patrick and I do follow up on a day-to-day basis, you will notice that we never do involve with power tools because even though he discussed me, I do like [inaudible].
>> Of course my wife will hunt you down and hurt you.
>> And you blew the hole.
>> Know what we just found out.
>> What?
>> System.
>> No.
>> S-Y-S-T-M is in the iPhone dictionary. They corrected my spelling of Systm, made it capital.
>> You think I'd be known by now.
>> Thanks [inaudible].
>> Welcome to Do It Yourself. It's nothing but fun, fun, fun.
