Friday, August 10, 2007

Everything is illuminated

Alright,
So lately I've had trouble illuminating my entire multitouch screen. I have been using a simple IR illuminator I constructed on a breadboard with 16 leds, but that would only light up a circular area in the middle of the screen. I needed something better and more adjustable and here is what I came up with.

I took a small piece of perf board and wired up 24 ir leds, 3 rows of 8 in parallel. I put this perf board in a small radio shack project box. After making two of these, I bent a aluminum bar in a U shape and attached the lights on each side with a nut and bolt so I can adjust them vertically. Finally, I drilled a hole in the bottom of the U and attached it to some floodlamp stands I had laying around. Viola! I made two of the U light assemblies and hooked them both up to the same 12V cpu power supply. They do a nice job of lighting up my entire screen and are easy to adjust. Here's a pic of what one of them look like.



Hopefully this can help somebody out who is struggling with how to build a simple IR illuminator. Oh, and these things were fairly cheap to build, which I find to be very important as my multitouch bill seems to keep growing and growing ;)

8 comments:

norette said...

cool!
What kind of ir leds are they?

Mikey said...

Hey Nora,
I used some 880nm leds from www.digikey.com. The part number is 475-1112-ND. Quite a few folks on nuigroup use the same ones.

Unknown said...

nice work....
you did not mention how well this worked out for you....
I am looking for a similar configuration but I want to make sure I find a tested one as my budget is growing too.

So how well is is working :)

Unknown said...

what screen area was this able to cover?

Unknown said...

I have a 70 inch frosted glass panel I am trying to light.

Mikey said...

Hey Paul,
I haven't seen how large of an area I can light yet. I've been working more on getting the software side of things down as that is more important at the moment since I can always add more light :)

Juan Camilo Mejía said...

Hi, I want to know how you put your illumination with respect to the screen. Thanks.

lseba said...

hi mikey! im having problems with the illumination in my table. how do you arrange the illuminator? are the walls covered or painted? any hel will be apreciated