It may not exactly be what [Princess Leia] used to beg [Obi-Wan] for help, but this Star Wars-inspired volumetric display is still a pretty cool hack, and with plenty of extra points for style.
In some ways, [Maker Mac]’s design is a bit like a 3D printer for images, in that it displays slices of a solid model onto closely spaced planar surfaces. Sounds simple enough, but there are a lot of clever details in this build. The main component is a lightly modified LCD projector, a DLP-based machine with an RGB color wheel. By removing the color wheel from the projector’s optical path and hooking its sync sensor up to the control electronics, [Mac] is able to increase the framerate of the display, at the cost of color, of course. Other optical elements include a mirror to direct the projected images upwards, and a shutter harvested from an old pair of 3D TV glasses.
For the screen, here’s where [Mac]’s design got really clever. Using a pair of 3D-printed compliant mechanisms, the motion from a pair of voice coils harvested from old speakers drives a trans2lucent screen across a vertical distance of about 25 mm. Driven with a sine wave of about 30 Hz, the images from the projector can be synced up to display twelve separate layers across the swept volume. It might seem like a very shallow display, but it looks deeper in the videos below.
[Mac] also put a ton of work into the toolchain to get STL models sliced into images and mapped onto the various layers of the display. As for the Star Wars part, that’s pretty much all about the enclosure, ..
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