Yesterday I finally built the body of my table. Before continuing this post, I would like to give many thanks to my dad Theo for helping me out tons with building the body of the table. Thanks to his experience in woodworking it was done in no time and the design came out great.
Thanks Theo!
So, let’s continue with some pictures:
Here’s the table loosely mocked up, no screws or glue yet!
Here the main “box” is put together. One side is left out for now because it will have to function as a door in the final design, so it’s eays for me to get inside and adjust things. Now, let’s get started on the complicated stuff; the table top.
You might remember this table top I put together a while ago. It was fine at the time, but now it needs a lot of adjustment to house the lasers safely, holding the LCD matrix and of course.. the acrylic.
In order to make the tabletop more compact, I decided to rip off the IR LED’s that I put in back when this table was meant to be an FTIR table. It wasn’t pleasant to do, but it’s for a good cause.
To put a neat frame around the LCD matrix that could hold the acrylic at the same time, we went with 4mm MDF and cut out a hole in the middle. The matrix will be suspended below this frame, the acrylic will be put on top of it. Here it is cut to fit the hole in the tabletop.
After cutting the hole in the frame, it was time to think about how to house the lasers. Now that I took my LED’s and aluminum frame off the acrylic, it was lowered substantially. In order to get the lasers levelled out with the acrylic, we decided to take out a part of the tabletop frame and put the lasers in there. Unfortunately the tabletop was partially glued so it took some violence to cut out these middle pieces.
Because of the force we had to use, the surface became a little uneven. To fix this, we mounted 6mm MDF squares in the holes, evening them out nicely. Now the lasers should be about level with the acrylic, and with eachother.
Next it was time to build the protective cover that will cover up all the electronics, and will make sure that no laser light can escape. It’s build from 2 layers, in the above picture is the 1st (bottom) layer. It’s 6mm MDF. The shapes that are cut out of it correspond with the holes that were cut for the lasers, and the 120 degree angle lenses that the laser have. This way the lasers can sit in the holes that were cut earlier and disperse their light at a maximum angle over the surface. The lasers are 12mm in diameter, and since the whole (with the MDF mounted in it) is 6mm deep, and the protective cover is also 6mm thick, it’s an exact fit.
Before putting on the top cover, there were some other small things to do. We mounted a small block on both sides of the tabletop, as can be seen in the picture. This block has two functions: it keeps the LCD matrix in it’s place once it’s sitting in the frame, and it support the thin (4mm) MDF frame that covers up the edges of the matrix and holds the acrylic. Simple, but effective.
Here we’re putting together the top cover. It will actually slide over the table as a sort of shoebox lid; the top two layers will be attached to piece of wood on the side, made to fit exactly over the box. Once you see the end results hopefully it will become clear what I mean.
Here’s the complete lid being held together by clamps. As you can see it has a rim around the edge that will slide neatly over the box. On top of that is the layer with the cutouts that will house the lasers, covered up by another layer featuring a wide rim that users can rest their arms on or put their stuff on. The whole thing put together is a very safe LLP setup, because no matter what happens, users can’t possibly get laser light into their eyes, not even if the lasers would somehow turn!
Here we’re putting in the crossbeams that will hold the “door”. The door will be attached with two magnets.
This is the final table, with the acrylic mounted in already. If you look at the enlarged version you can see the sandwich construction in there. Once the matrix is mounted though, all of this will become invisible and the screen will simply look black.
Later on this week I will paint the table and drop in the electronics. I’m not expecting this to be too much work. Stay tuned for more!
