Greg's great lumia presentation at last month's SELEM convinced me to finish a lumia upgrade to one of my Chinese projectors that's been sitting on the bench. I thought I'd share the results of this small project.
GOAL: Get one of my analog RGB projectors a DMX controlled lumia upgrade without sacrificing its ability to do graphics and beam shows.
APPROACH: Gut a new / cheap DMX flat mirror scanner for the controller, stepper motor and anything else that is of use out of it. Cram said items into existing RGB projector without screwing up anything else.
PARTS:
Meierlight 1W RGB Analog Projector I chose this projector for the upgrade because it was the only one that had the space to install the upgrade. I needed room for the DMX panel on the outside of the case, a place to mount the transformer and room to mount the motor and lumia wheel without causing a disaster if something shifted slightly.
StageApe Phoenix flat mirror scanner. I chose this unit primarily due to its low cost and necessary functionality. It comes with a very basic gobo wheel with 10 positions including open. All I need from the controller is the ability to stop on each gobo position reliably and slowly index via DMX and this unit does it. The DMX controller's gobo channel also includes shifting between two adjoining positions quickly and adjustable indexing speeds.
Glass Lumia Wheel built by Rick Poulin. There was a reference to Rick's work here on PL so I contacted him. He built the wheel to my exact specifications including leaving two open spots so I could continue to use the laser projector for beam and graphics the majority of the time. As the expert, I had him choose the glass for each of the remaining 8 positions. The result was a solid build about half an inch thick including the glass base. Based on what I learned subsequently on Greg's lumia tutorial at SELEM this year, I'm glad I had someone with glass cutting tools and expertise do this work.
Transformer The one that came with the mirror scanner was a 6 pound behemoth. No room for that in my already tight build.
COST:
IMPLEMENTATION:
This was a quick and straightforward build. I simply took mounting parts from the scanner and modified them to the correct height of my optics deck.
The weight and associated torque of the lumia wheel required additional support. As I didn't have any bearings on hand, a plastic spacer mounted to the optics deck was an adequate compromise. It won't be getting many hours of active run time nor will it be spinning fast enough to cause much wear and tear, but a bit of white lithium grease was included to help increase its lifespan.
The DMX control panel was fairly large and the only space left on the case was the top panel, so that's where it and the transformer got mounted. As the transformer sits above the diodes, having it completely enclosed in a plastic case gives me some comfort if it were to ever come loose.
The lumia wheel gets jerked around fairly quickly by the stepper moter when going directly to a gobo or bouncing between two gobos, so it needed to be tightened down to the shaft adequately without causing too much stress on the glass to crack it. I ended up using a rubber washer on the inside of the lumia wheel and locked it down with steel washers over washers made from foam insulation. The result is a tight enough fit to keep the lumia wheel from rotating on the shaft without putting too much stress on the glass - or so I hope. I also made sure that the default DMX position is clear glass.
RESULTS
I captured the following video using the projector's normal mounted position which goes through a scrim. Between the fog and the scrim, some of the effect is lost this way, but it is still pretty cool without losing the projector's ability to do beam or graphics, as the video attempts to highlight. An even finer mesh material for the scrim may help offset the loss. Withdrawing the scrim completely allows for traditional lumia projection onto the ceiling. Of course this can also be seen with the scrim in place, albeit with some loss.
After the first attempt at this project I noticed a few things that needed adjusting. First, the projector needed diode upgrades to allow for a brighter lumia projection. Doing some swapping of components left me with a 1.5W projector with good white balance. I also attempted to disassemble the glass lumia wheel in order to remove the silicon adhesive in beam path. Even after soaking the wheel in a variety of chemicals for a week, the silicon held firmly enough that I snapped the glass wheel when removing the lumia glass. I had another one manufactured and glued the lumia glass to the wheel only on the edges. This helped significantly.
DMX Lumia Wheel Addition to 1.5W RGB Projector
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