With the screen temporarily hung, it was time to decide how to lay out the acrylic sheets on which the 3DTV’s processing, driver and control boards would go. These would be mounted above the LCD layer of the TV and had to be laid out in a way which allowed for the signal bearing pre-made (rather intricate looking) cables and connectors would still reach each other.
The Main Board
First up was the mainboard, this has all of the AV in and out ports and connects through to what looks like a 3D driver board (below) and onto the LCD. It also has headers which jump to boards on the front bezel and power board. Here we used a scan of the board (later mirrored and flipped) for hole alignment to ensure PCB risers are in the correct location.
Vector Graphics for the Mainboard perspex mount, here a scan of the mainboard allows laser cut holes for PCB raisers.
Once the graphics were created it was time to jump onto the laser cutter. But first, in order to decide on setting to use for the etch, some test charts were made at different power, speed and focus depth.
Once we had selected settings it was time to lazer!
People cant even talk to me when I’m watching it.
The 3D Processing Board
This board has an FPGA mounted directly in the centre and some supporting IC’s on the rear. It seems to take the signalling used to drive the LCD display and process it in some way (probably distributing line by line to the alternately polarized areas) to generate the alternately polarized light for 3D viewing. This is likely an add on to a non 3D model of the mainboard, avoiding a redesign and the associated costs. Either way, for our purposes, it needs to be mounted along side the main board to which it is connected, but above the centre of the LCD as it connects directly to a PCB driving the panels.
Since this is the 3D processing board, we should make the mount look more 3D! So the board itself is mounted on a platform which sits at an angle, take a look at the images below to see what I’m on about!
Here is the vector design ready for the laser cutter. Along side it is a scan of the back of the PCB, one again for hole alignment.
Vector Graphics for the 3D processor perspex mount, once again a scan of the board allows laser cut holes for PCB raisers.
Back over to the laser cutter:
The 3D floating platform for the PCB:
Finished Product with some green LED strip on the small platform (in green above) installed:
[…] different colours represent different depths of raster engraving. From our earlier experiments in Pt.1, we could quickly decide these. I took a quick snap of the settings […]