Inside TI's DLP LightCrafter

EE Times Europe previously gave away some DLP LIghtCrafter 2.0 kits from Texas Instruments, and one of the winners was Ivan Kuten, head of R&D at Promwad, an independent electronics design house in Eastern Europe.

Together with his engineering team, Kuten has studied the pico projector (DLP3000-C300REF) offered by Texas Instruments.

They came up with an analysis of the supplied package, its circuitry, the start-up demo, and now they share their first impressions with photos and screenshots of the different operational modes, together with a software assembly description (Linux + rootfs) and their own evaluation.

Read Kuten's unboxing report below:

There are a number of technologies employed in modern pico projectors: DLP (Digital Light Processing); LCoS (Liquid crystal on silicon) and LCD. We will not discuss the last two, but will dwell in greater detail on DLP, which is the technology our device uses.

DLP is based on DMD, digital micromirror device, a chipset, which has on its surface several hundred thousand micromirrors put together in a single pixel array.

Each of the mirrors can deflect in both directions from its initial position at a slight angle (10-12 degrees), which enables ONOFF. Light hitting the mirror will be directed to the optics or sideways (usually to the cooling system). To display halftones, the mirror goes from on to off at high speed, using pulse width modulation.

Red, green and blue LEDs are used as emitters.

Package contents

The device itself was located in a small box. There were no cables and software. All things had to be supplied individually, but it is no problem if you have the Internet and standard cables.

The package had the following contents: