Turn Your Old Android Smartphone Into a 4K Movie Projector
If you have an old Android phone lying around, you can follow this tutorial to use that smartphone to build your own 4K video projector.
A projector is a great way to bring the movie theater experience into your home, but they can be quite expensive. Yes, you can buy one of those little smartphone projectors for very little money, but those are pretty terrible. A real projector that will satisfy a movie lover will cost several hundred dollars. If you want 4K resolution, then you’ll be spending well over a thousand dollars. But if you have an old Android phone lying around, you can follow DIY Perks’ YouTube video tutorial to use that smartphone to build your own 4K video projector.
The resolution of your DIY projector will depend on the resolution of your phone’s screen, and that screen has to be an LCD — OLED will not work. For this project, DIY Perks used a 2015 Sony Xperia Z5 Premium Android smartphone with a broken back housing. That phone came with an impressive 4K LCD. If your phone doesn’t have 4K, you can settle for whatever resolution it does have or you can purchase a separate LCD to use. Videos will be played from the phone, which means you can watch YouTube, Netflix, videos stored locally, and more. You will want to make sure that your phone has OTG support so you can connect USB devices like a keyboard and mouse to navigate through the phone’s apps and menus without touching the screen.
This projector is designed as a vertical tower constructed from threaded rod and aluminum plates. Each “floor” of that tower contains a key component of the projection system. The first floor on the bottom contains a large heatsink repurposed from a PC. That cools the powerful 100W LED that sits on the second floor of the tower. Floors three and four contain flat Fresnel lenses that direct the light from the LED towards the projection lens. The fifth floor is where the Android phone is positioned. The phone should be disassembled and have the backlight removed from the LCD panel. The light shines through the LCD and onto the projection lens on the sixth floor. Finally, a mirror is mounted at the very top of the tower at a 45 degree angle in order to project the image towards the screen. If you want a high-quality projector that’s still affordable, this is definitely a project you’ll want to consider.
