Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Project Shutterglasses

So I got these LCD shutter glasses from a friend. (thank you friend)
And so I figured there ought to be a way of making them work without getting a whole new , or old , graphics card.
I googled wide and far, and found loads of interesting projects. none of which actualy had any blueprints available.
The sites hosting those have seized to exist.
I wonder whatever happened to all that VMRL stuff that was being developed back in the 99s.
Seems that everyone just forgot about it all.
Anyhow.. on with the project.

In short the technology is incredibly simple.
you need power for the glasses, and one sync signal.
Closer investigations on different projects reveals that the V-sync signal from the Vga port can be used.
I was going rip the graphics card out and solder the needed cables directly onto it, but then I found an old vga patch cable from an old voodoo2 card. (wow, remember those?)
So rather than soldering the card, I'm going to try and patch the patch cable.

I carefully cut a bit of the insulator off in the middle , because I didn't want to cut the whole cable into 2 pieces and mess around soldering 15 leads , when all I need is 3 leads.
Next step is to locate the cables used for the pins I'm after.
Pin 9 (+5v) , Pin 10 (ground) , and Pin 14 (Vertical Sync) (ty wiki)
And so I grabbed my trusty multimeter, only to find it less than trustworthy, infact it was quite dead.
One 9v battery change later I was ready to go.
Only to run into a slight snag, namely, the cables are all still insulated individualy. and I realy dont want to cut any more cables than I need too.
I found an acupunkture needle i quickly patched up to be used with the multimeter.
10 pokes later I found my cables.

tbc