This project got started when I was interning at our school’s computer lab. As I passed by a recycling bin for discarded electronics I spotted a video projector in there that seemed to be mostly intact. I asked my teacher and the schools’ tech support who worked in the lab why the projector had been thrown away and got the answer that it blows fuses. I then asked if I could take the projector home to take it apart and try to figure out how to fix it. I got the permission and brought the projector home with me. This was followed by three days that went well into the night of franticly searching for information and troubleshooting.
After making sure our apartment was equipped with circuit breakers I went on to see what happens when the projector is turned on. Nothing happened. At this point it became pretty obvious that the power board wasn’t in mint condition. Quite a few message boards told stories of projectors that were successfully resuscitated by replacing a couple of old and tired capacitors with new ones. It was time to start doing instead of just thinking.
Opening and taking apart the projector was a routine screw-off-the-screws-and-rip-stuff-away-kind of operation. The power supply consisted of two printed circuit boars decked on top of each other. The faulty components were on one of these boards. This was a good design since it left me plenty of space to fool around with a soldering iron. The soldering itself and replacing the capacitors took me about 15 minutes. After putting everything back together it was time to see if I had achieved any results by doing all this work. To my surprise the projector turned on and started to project an image onto the wall. Who would have guessed? All in all I spent about 21 euros on the whole project of which 17€ was spent on an M1-DA-to-HDMI adaptor. For that amount of money I got myself a video projector and a little scar from burnin myself with the soldering iron.
