The Box

I spent hours with Google Sketchup trying to model and plan the box dimensions and mirror placement. It's an excellent tool but I'm just not good enough with it and gave up on accurate blueprints.

I also spent hours brushing up on trig and trying to work out what the minimum depth I could get away with. Paper cutouts to scale were more helpful but in the end I decided to just put the mirror at 45deg. It's just a regular 4mm plate glass mirror fixed to a piece of chipboard with silicon sealant. Hopefully ghosting won't be an issue.



Wickes cut 18mm chipboard to size and all true & square. I used cabinet making corner blocks and wood glue to hold the thing together. Only after the first fit wasn't properly square did I think to use tie down straps around the outside to pull it all up tight whilst screwing & glueing.



The mirror supports and mirror are not yet fixed in place. A bit of experimenting with the camera show that there is only just enough space to allow the camera to see the whole of the LCD screen area in the mirror. I'm going to paint the interior in brilliant white to help produce a good diffused backlight.

LCD TV tear down

It's a goodmans GTVL32W8HD and has 2x SCART, 1x VGA, RGB and HDMI inputs




The LCD Panel is an LG Philips LC320W01










Taking it apart was slow but not complicated. There in the final pic you can see - left to right - the backlight, the controller boards and the LCD panel.

PS3 Eyecam

There are 2 kinds of PS3 Eyecams, you can read all about it at Peau Productions. I ordered one online and it was the difficult conversion kind. Despite being forewarned & my best efforts, I destroyed the lens. A fisheye lens from maplin was ordered because I want to keep the screen at coffee table height ( 16" - 18" ). The 3.6mm lens isn't a perfect fit, there's limited screw threads but just enough to come into focus. The floppy disk IR filter, tested with a TV remote control, works well in tests.

Shopping

Lot's of shopping, here are some links for suppliers, they've all been quick & good :
8mm Acrylic for FTIR
850nm IR LED strip x 5
PS3 webcam
Fisheye lens
and a 32" Goodmans LCD TV from ebay

1st post

Between the excellent lumenlab and nuigroup sites I decided I would have a go at building my very own multitouch coffee table.