What is it you might ask? Well, believe it or not it's a projector made from a bunch of chipboard, a dissected LCD screen, a Fresnel refracting sheet to focus the image, a map loupe as a projecting lens, and a work light to power the whole thing. I forget when exactly I built this, but I think it was summer 2003, when the cheapest projectors were close to a grand and the discount, pocket sized ones we have today were still a long way off.
I made the whole thing with hand tools in my parents' basement over a college break. It's safe to say it wasn't HD quality (the edges of the screen had the hazy border like TV sitcom dream sequences), but given time it was built and the materials it required, I thought it was pretty impressive.
The front piece slid on 4 carriage bolts as a focusing mechanism and the lid had a couple small fans built into it to prevent overheating.
Here's an example of my design-on-the-fly approach. I was able to keep the monitors control board attached and just bend the ribbon cable 90 degrees to expose the controls and VGA port on the outside of the projector.
I took inspiration from other projects on the internet, but like many of my projects, pretty much designed things as I went. Besides learning about optics and of course, having a passably working projector, the coolest thing about building this was taking apart an LCD screen and realizing that the image on the screen is displayed on a transparent layer, which is simply lit from behind by a light with a diffuser. Here's a pretty nice video showing what I mean:
