Love it, one of the few tasteful "novelty" lamps that I've come across. Too bad one needs 3-4 of the exact same size displays though, I've got a couple unused ones laying around, but they're not the same size...
If you can get at least two the same size, and four with a common height, you could do a rectangle or a trapezoid, which would look good.
Heck if you could find enough displays at a computing recycling center you could do interesting things with an irregular hexagon...
But if you can find monitors that are close but not exact, you could adjust them via the bezel. You’ll have to correct for the pattern sizes on each face if you do that, though. Put the one that looks the worst in the back, of course.
You could, perhaps, make one shaped like a triangle instead of a square, with just the one side facing out from a corner into the room. The other two sides could be just translucent to give reflected light into the room.
Or laser cutout to project a pattern behind it, ambient lighting, or even project a pattern, same for camouflage or different for contrast on a wall behind it.
It is exactly how a monitor works, but this is more than just a change of label. This looks like a lamp. Form factor matters. There's a reason people don't normally use monitors as lamps despite the fact that they do a perfectly good job at emitting light.
Absolutely, this is a very nicely-executed build. Though most monitor backlights are only about half as bright as that LED bulb. I wonder if you were willing to sacrifice detail if you couldn't use smaller screens (smartphone, say), farther from the paper shade...
I'm guessing that it would be cheaper to use, say, four Raspberry PIs instead of the single Jetson; you then get four HDMI ports, and can skip the extra display controller? Bit more software, of course.
I've actually built a second iteration that uses a Raspberry Pi 4 that has 2 HDMI ports, and uses 2 2-way splitters. The hardware was much cheaper and this version can support complementary pairs of images or bookending of the same pattern. It's still not a cheap project, but more approachable. Also, thank you!
> I salvaged some 13” LCD displays from old laptops and found additional matching displays on ebay.
The LCDs were taken from old disused equipment.
> I happened to have an Nvidia Jetson Nano
And the board was disused equipment too, it seems.
I find this kind of reuse very inspiring. Once I no longer need my old laptops, I feel like it might be fun to do something similar instead of shipping the whole thing to a recycling plant. You could even use LCDs that have dead pixels or other defects.
You could argue that requiring a 35 W LED lamp is wasteful, or the power used by the SoC (10 W max), etc., but together that's still about as much as a standard incandescent lamp.
Yup. I agree it's translucent. Even without the diffusion layers I added, LCD displays are not really transparent. They block a lot of light due to the pair of polarizes on either side of a panel. I found that the term "transparent LCD" was used in industry wherever people use LCD panels without a blocking backer, so I used this term also.
How do you figure this out? There are a few projects I can think of where an old laptop monitor and an SBC would be a good pairing.