Category: Video

So I had this funny idea that you could embed a music player into a wooden box with a song the person absolutely hates and when they open it the music would blast out at them until they closed the box.

Each time they opened it the same thing would happen.

My cousin and I planned on sending this to one of our friends disguised as a commemorative hockey puck to one of our friends with some Phil Collins “Easy Lover”, which I really like did but he couldn’t stand.

I started the process by finding a small MP3 player that had a start on power up feature.

I then went looking for some PC speakers with a built in amp and found one at a local thrift shop.

I removed the amplifier and looked up the datasheet for the supply voltage needed, I found out it could definitely run off a 9V battery so I sketched out a circuit that would control the amp power, detect the open box, and turn on the mp3 player and start playing.

After I sketched it up, I built the prototype circuit.

Here is a video of it working, forgive the sound, for some reason it came out really quiet on my old phone.

After testing, I packed it carefully into the false bottom of a box and disguised it.

It worked great!

So this project started off as a light that I could push a button and last one minute.

I originally made this to solve the problem of the hallway to my flat always being dark and the time I needed to get my shoes off and open the door was about one minute worst case.

Eventually I would move this into its current place in the bathroom for a late night light.

I made a video of the process of design from doing the circuit design to working prototype.

If you notice in the video, I timed the light and it was less than a minute.

That is because the LED will only light when it has enough voltage for forward conduction and to make this light last long enough we would have to actually calculate the time until that cutoff point to nail the 60sec.

But 44 seconds works extremely well.

Since tearing down my home theater and parting ways with my beautiful CRT projector when I moved out of state. I began to think about projectors and though to myself, hey I only really dug deep into CRT projectors, I wonder what else is out there.

So I did what I do best and that is find every single book I could find on projectors and begin to read about all the different types of projectors and how they function both optically and electrically as well as blending multiple projectors. I read about the latest laser projection technologies and tracked down a theater to see it in person. Personally I am excited about laser projection because it brings us back towards what CRT did best and that was a great film quality and fantastic contrast ratio. If I build another theater I am so on board to find a broken laser projector from a theater and fix it.

During this time I also found a few projectors to tear into and ended up fixing several and either selling or giving them away.

One of the projectors I had to fix was a Dwin DLP projector to fix because I had a CRT projector made by them that I just could never fix, no matter how hard I tried.

This time I did not fail and even had to make a custom cable to get it working.

At first I used it to play movies and theme my office wall but then eventually turned it into a flight simulator when I found a scrap multiprocessing server. (I had a flight yoke and everything.) Office flight simulator!!

I played with projecting on objects and using video loops.

I also had pico projectors in my office.

For Halloween and Christmas I even had a projected fire complete with essential oils providing the smell of the fire.

Here is a video of my office during Halloween: