Casio XJ-A235V Slim Video Projector Teardown/DMD Hack Attempt.
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- Опубліковано 18 січ 2019
- This video is a teardown of the Casio slim LED/Laser DLP video projector and attempt to get the system to run without the lasers. Since it deals with so much serial communications I could not get it to fully run. However I did manage to get some random displayed lines on the DMD and got some microscope footage! This along with an explanation of the optics are included. Thanks to my friends at Laser Fusion for the device to try to hack into, lot's of things where learned in doing the teardown.
- Наука та технологія
Those Casio projectors are so stupidly complicated, but i love that someone was crazy enough to do it!
Zenodilodon
Love this you should teach, i learned more about these projectors in 24:55 than in the previous few years of playing with these and similar (lots of speckled dlp on the second hand market as they tend to do a couple thousand hours before the micro mirrors conk out) again, stupendously informative video, YOU ROCK BRUV!
Thanks much! I love optics and stuff, I don't think it's a subject that can get boring :P
@@Zenodilodon perhaps you might consider doing a vid on an arc lighter on steroids as the commercial ones only have a 5mm arc and a low duty cycle something zvs'y with common transformer (ccfl etc) with a 10mm or so arc that can be run for a while without self destructing would be nice. just a thought! :-)
@@qutube100 You should see the lamp drivers I pulled from this massive Sony projector, there where 4 of them, it was an older HUGE projector. Do you do anything with them yourself?
@@Zenodilodon I always find a new use for olde stuff i have a big collection of drivers, coils and associated peripherals from many different projectors/screens and i love high voltage in small packages . i am going to try using the beam blurring fingies from your vid to help combine several laser diode beams into one fat but collimated beam (an ongoing project that had stalled till now) also loving the rest of your vids and the ones where you have input on join the technicians! keep it up dude you stimulate new sparks where only embers lay glowing thankyou...
@@qutube100 The mirror system would work well, I would also say for lasers look into DIY knife edge arrays and PBS cubes. Aren't all projects ongoing ones? Solutions are where the brain decides to stop engineering :P
Very very good job.thanks for information
What pins did you use to power the led
Hello. I have a question. There is a Casio xj-h1600 projector, everything worked fine and at one moment, pressing the power button, it tried to start, that is, the fans started working, the lamp blinked and after a second everything turned off. The power and temp indicators are on. Please tell me as a professional what it can be? Thank.
Cool! I’ve wondered why these aren’t used in VR goggles since it seems you can get very small dlps that are between HD and 4K resolution.
The digital mirror devices are used in things lile google glass and other head sets for VR. The are monochromatic devices and do require some sort of RGB light source for color displays. In VR they use LEDs like in the small pico projectors. They also have recently developed new LED micro displays up to 1080 resolution and I am certain this tech will be in newer VR headsets.
ua-cam.com/video/4PqMQobkUhg/v-deo.html
Great explanation, thank you! J got Casio xj a141,any idea why is left side of picture cold(and j think a little lower brightness) while right is warm(true white is only on middle picture)? This is discreet but still visible..
Thank you.
hmm, I would check 2 things, the phosphor/color wheel and the red LED. It could be a burned section of phosphor causing a bunch of extra blue light from lack of conversion to green or the red LED may be failing on one side. This would be my only guess as to the cause, there may be a misaligned reflector somewhere as well. Look through the optical layout carefully, check the condition of those parts and ensure that reflection angles are correct on mirrors and dichroic filters.
@@Zenodilodon
Your help helped me a lot, after a couple of researches I found that the mirrors on the laser were not in the right direction towards the blur lens, so I adjusted it very little (a couple of mm) (there is a screw for it on the back) and got white on the entire surface of the image .. Also, the colorwheel can be moved back and forth and also to regulate the level of white color in the image ..
Thanks a lot for the very helpful video and advice!
the laser modules in there are great have one 35 watts of blue power
Jep some serious powa !
I have Casio XJ-M145 & after 1300 Hours used brightness is very down
Any solutions for increasing brightness?
I would check the integrity of your phosphor wheel, what color is effected the most?
Have the xj-a141 that doesn't work and I figure let me take a look at it and see if it is something I can fix before work tosses it. The thing only lasted 3 years before it went out. When I turn it on, I hear clicking like a bad hard drive and based on your video, it sounds like it is coming around the phosphorus wheel. I haven't taken it fully apart, but have you seen or know for these wheel motors to get stuck or go bad? Unless it is coming from the Red Laser assembly and the clicking is trying to start up the laser?? it's definitely something mechanical that is trying to start..Like a relay switch of some sort...After a while, it will then go to solid red light errors on the power and temp lights when trying to power on.
Sounds like a fan is jammed and it can't spin and cool down. I Would check to see if all the fans spin. The phosphor wheels can fail but I don't think it would click unless it was mechanically broken. Give the unit a decent smack and see if there is any debris that frees up and comes out. let me know how it goes.
@@Zenodilodon I have the bottom cover off where I can see the two small fans and they do not spin, but they also aren't jammed up as I can freely spin them..The click isn't from them unless there is some relay trying to start them up..The click comes from the location where that wheel is..Looks like I will tear it down all the way and see for sure...This isn't something I need to fix, I am just toying around with it as a I am a techie nut and like to see how things work and if I can fix them. Work was tossing it as we got a new one and just doing this on my down times here :)
Very interesting! Would it be possible to say salvage three separate DMDs and with different colored lasers produce a beautiful combined image?
You don't need 3 separate DMDs, it would probably be better to use one and combine the lasers before the DMD just like the projector does with other light sources. Some projectors are already using banks of green and red laser diodes in really high end models. I am hoping to figure out more about integrating DMDs and Laser, I have to get a DMD that I can easily run though. Laser can be rather harmful to DMDs as well so there is a size vs power struggle as well.
@@Zenodilodon Thank you for your thorough and interesting reply! Sorry for the dumb question, but would the dmd be hit by one laser at the time, but in such a high frequency that I would perceive it as the mix of the colors in question? Or is there another way to regulate the amount of each color in each pixel of the image? Additionally, what makes the red and green lasers so expensive as compared to the blue laser. Thanks again!
All good questions, by nature a DMD is a grey scale device, so yes the lasers would have to be cycled at high repetition for a colored image. As far as the market for lasers there are a few things to note. Market demand, blue lasers have been big as a light source in many applications from projectors to car headlights. Secondly when mixing lasers together it can be a challenge to get all of the output profiles matched up so they still share the same profile at long distances, this can lead to other expenses like corrective and combining optics. Red lasers are notorious for poor output as higher powers in beam profile, green itself is relatively new but the price is dropping. In contrast to green blue is rather old. I think the first blue laser diode was invented around 1996.
@@Zenodilodon Thanks for the quick response and thorough reply!
My initial thought of a projector with three dmds was based on the assumption that dmds are not cheap, but that lasers are even more expensive (I don't know if that is true, I just got that impression) and with three separate dmds one would be able to achieve a three times higher refresh rate. But maybe one can a achieve a refresh rate beyond what is perceivable to us with just one dmd, which would make a three dmd projector a waste of our resources.
Looking forward to the prices on laser diodes coming down and projectors with multiple dedicated lasers brcoming available. As someone who is new to these things, one wpuld have guessed that red eould be cheap, since it is the first laser that I remember to have seen (in laser pointers). Though those are probably not nearly powerful enough for a projector.
Yes, to control the dmd chip doesn't seem trivial!
I wonder how bright and clear these high end three laser projectors get. Would they be able to compete with modern screen technology, or would that require unsafe levels of energy output by the lasers?
Thanks again for taking your time to educate on this subject! What a beautiful and interesting technology!
@@dempa3 Your assumption of a better refresh rate is mostly on point, there is often a color wheel inside of a DMD based projector that controls the refresh rates and some of them can get moving pretty quick. 3 way LCD and 3 way LCoS are also other competing technologies, mostly to escape the rainbow effects of a color wheel. Newer technologies can also utilize direct modulation of solid state sources, such as LED and Laser and they can have much faster modulation rates than a color wheel.
The laser market will continue to drop within reason due to demands, some patents for OPSL are ending as well I think so that could become more popular. If you are just getting into lasers I will tell you it's a whole wide world out there. There are many forms of lasers such as gas/ion, flash pumped, TEA, dye, DPSS, OPSL, PPNL, Q-dot, free electron, and more! Many of which I hope to eventually get more of myself.
As you get into this more you will find that there is a whole list of debate over a good red laser diode. It's pretty much a split between trying to correct the beam on a powerful one, or trying to knife edge a bunch of smaller ones with low divergence. Needless to say, they all pretty much are terrible and nobody in the show laser industry likes dealing with high power red units.
As far as exposure, light is light and it's pretty much only dangerous in a laser when concentrated. Water is reasonably safe until you try drinking from a high pressure water jet. It's the same principle in a laser based video projector. Show lasers are dangerous because they maintain a concentrated beam.
Do you have any experience with the xj-f20xn dlp projectors?
Not that exact model no, but I have worked on and torn down various projectors and for the most part they are pretty alike. If you have a question feel free to ask and I will try to help.
Hi, I've been searching around but cant find a definitive answer about the laser diode array (nubm) that I scrapped from an XJ model, if I may ask, is it gold plated..?
The diodes are gold plated but nothing else to my knowledge. You'd make more money throwing the bank/diodes up for sale then trying to recover any gold from it. However if it's gold plated stuff you want I will gladly trade gold plated stuff for diodes!
@@Zenodilodon I wish I can send you some images of the diode I got, also cant post any eternal links from youtube, but a littile bit of googling "nubm44" or "nubm42" "bank" will get you to those images of the diode im saying, so is the entire thing the diode but the gold looking thing they are in is not?
@@Zenodilodon thank you for responding by the way
@@maximooze3196 I haven't pulled any diodes out of projectors. The set of them my friend had where not plated. I just checked the image for the model you sent and it does look like those are. If you see gold than it's most likely plated. There could be confusion on it because of different variations of the laser diode assembly. I doubt it's just brass as that's a poor heat conductor compared to aluminum.
@@Zenodilodon my apologies, what I was asking was if its gold "plated", and confirming that it is, Im happy to know, and yes its most likely aluminum as its not magnetic, sorry I didnt make it clear/😓, but thank you so much anyways.
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i sell m140 2w blue laser diodes
Cool!
oh, I can't watch how he is pointing with screwdriver and then touch the glass parts :D omg