Today I went out and bought some caulk paper to use as an alternative diffuser in my LCD screen. The original one didn’t let IR light through, so it had to go. But in taking that diffuser out, I exposed a honeycomb screen that is embedded in an essential layer in the screen that I can’t take out. So I had to find a different diffuser, and several people suggested I use caulk paper (tracing paper), which is also used by a lot of people to project onto.
Unfortunately they didn’t have the right size paper for my screen, So I had to use one piece and then a little slice of another sheet to fill up the entire screen. This results in a thin (barely visible) vertical line on the screen, but for now it’ll do. When they get the bigger sizes paper in, I’ll just replace it.
The other problem I was having with the screen was that it seemed to be giving off a crapload of IR light, hence showing up like a bright white rectangle in TouchLib. After fiddling around with the settings a lot, I managed to get settings that pretty much solve this, and still managed to pick up blobs from the TV remote. I hope this means I’ll also be able to pick up blobs from my lasers (which haven’t arrived yet).
Still, I find it weird that my screen gives off so much IR, since the backlights in there should be TL which doesn’t give off any IR. Granted, the lights do get quite hot, but there’s a very uniform slab of IR light which I can’t imagine is being caused by heat..
Here’s a photo:
You can clearly see the white rectangle (this is an image of the matrix hanging over the edge of the table slightly, with the camera sitting on the floor. That’s why you only see a small strip of the matrix in TouchLib), but with the right settings I was able to fix it mostly. If someone could enlighten me on what’s going on here, that’d be great though, because as far as I can see that is IR light, right?
Well, I suppose next is finding an efficient to mount the matrix and the layers, and then start running some software on this thing.
Stay tuned for more.
