Listen, it hurts to hear, but somebody needs to say it. It’s over, OK? You’ve got to admit it and move on. Sure, you could get away with it for a week or two in January, but now it’s just getting weird. No matter how hard you fight it, the facts are the facts: the holidays are over. It’s time to pack up all those lights and decorations before the neighbors really start talking.

But don’t worry, because there’s an upside. Retailers are now gearing up for their next big selling season, which means right now clearance racks the world over are likely to be playing home to holiday lights and decor. That wouldn’t have been very interesting to the average hacker or maker a few years ago, after all, there’s only so much you can do with a string of twinkle lights. But today, holiday decorations are dripping with the sort of high-tech features you’d expect from gadgets that are actively aiming to be obsolete within the next ten months or so.

Case in point, the “AppLights Personalized Projection” which I found sulking around the clearance section of the Home Depot a couple weeks back. This device advertises the ability to project multi-color custom messages and animations on your wall, and is configured over Bluetooth with a companion application on your Android or iOS device. At a minimum we can assume the device must contain a fairly powerful RGB LED, an LCD to shine the light through, and some sort of Bluetooth-compatible microcontroller. For $20 USD, I thought it was worth taking a shot on.

Around this time last year, the regular Hackaday reader may recall I did a teardown for a Christmas laser projector. Inside we found red, green, and blue lasers of considerable power, as well as all the optics and support hardware to get them running. It was a veritable laser playground for $14. Let’s see if the AppLights projector turns out to be a similar electronic cornucopia, and whether or not we’ve got a new Hackaday Holiday tradition on our hands.

Keeping it Simple

After removing the screws on the bottom of the projector, the top half of the shell easily comes off to reveal the internals. As predicted, the device contains an LED, some optics, and a small LCD for the light to pass through. It does seem like there’s a lot of wasted space inside the enclosure, but overall, the internals are exactly what you’d expect considering we’re looking at what’s essentially an LCD projector built to the lowest price possible.

One interesting note here is that the enclosure has a sealed shut battery compartment. It would seem that at some point the designers thought of allowing the user to run the projector off of standard AA batteries, but this feature was likely deleted due to what was certainly a very short runtime. Though one does wonder what advantage a battery powered holiday projector would even hold, given the …read more

Source:: Hackaday