Birthday-paloosa 2017 Turns Into Home Theater & Lan Party

My children were born 3 days apart; well actually, 3 days shy of 3 years, making it 2 years and 262 days. So, once a year, we have a birthday weekend. When it's over we collapse. We have the condolences of all our friends and co-workers, but it's really not horrible. It's chaos for a weekend, then it's done... till next year. This year, my daughter turned 11 and my son 14. And any of you with teenage/pre-teenage children will know that it's a weird age. My daughter still wanted a traditional sleep-over with 7 other squealing girls but my son was over the theme thing and just wanted to have a few of his like-minded (read nerdy, no surprise there huh) friends over and play games, eat pizza, and drink lots of carbonated beverages. This year though, both of these things will have long-term effects on me and my hobbies.

The daughter decided that this looked like a good idea...... so we built it....... Yes, a Drive-In theater..... in our driveway. Here's what happened.

Around the time we started talking about party ideas, I was working on a projector I had picked up for $15 years ago. No, that's not it. The simple fix was to replace the bulb, but that didn't work, so I was looking around to see if there was another one on Craigslist. What I found was that old projectors taken from schools and offices are cheap. Like ranging from $15 to $50 cheap! This started the wheels turning in my head. Being a teacher, I'm very familiar with them and their capabilities, so I bought one for $30; an NEC VT480. For $30, I got a machine with 70% left on it's 2000 thousand hour bulb life and 800 x 600 resolution (1024 x 768 data) which is plenty to project a move to a pretty decent size. Thus was born, the "home drive-in" idea.

The next step was to figure out what to do about a screen. My first impulse was to hang a big sheet or two on the garage door and call it good. However, as most of you are aware, in today's world, the first step is usually to go to YouTube and research. What I found was that it wasn't very difficult or expensive to build your own proper screen. Most look like the above, using construction lumber and "black-out" curtain material which ironically is white. I also found that there's a place out there that specializes in this stuff called Carl's Place: https://www.carlofet.com/ .....and this is where my daughter's desires and my own cross paths. While researching the proper size, I realized that I could build it to fit across the front my my media cabinetry and have a good sized screen that's a normal 16:9 wide-screen aspect ration. When it hit me, I ran out to the garage, grabbed the tape measure and ran up stairs to the "game room" and started measuring! Sure enough. I have roughly 98" across, 55" vertical giving me about 112" diagonal which is pretty darned close to the correct maximum screen size for our primary seating distance (read, mine and my wife's recliners) AND was about the size I had outside on the fence to hang it!!! 

 

Here's the result, attached to out backyard fence at the end of the driveway. You can see the projector sitting on a folding card table. Total cost? About $60; $30 for the projector picked up locally on Craigslist and the correctly sized screen material from Carl's bought off of Amazon Prime and delivered in 2 days. I used some 1" x 4" lumber that I had, so if you don't have any laying around, it'll be another $15-20. I used the "pocket screw" method of building which was amazingly easy. I did buy the Kreg R3 kit for $40 from Lowes, but I don't really count the cost since I've been looking for an excuse to buy one and will use it as part of my woodworking hobby for years to come. 

So, away from the screaming 5th grade girls and back to the home theater. When all is said and done, I now have a screen that's sized to fit exactly across the cabinetry of my home theater in the "game room". How is that going to work? Obviously, I can't cover my cabinetry that houses the A/V gear (not to mention the 55", 4K TV) on a regular basis, not to mention crushing my wife's Morning Glories on the trellis!

The solution was to put a "French-Cleat" on the back of the screen frame. This came out of the need to attach it to the fence, but not have a permanent mount on there. So I built a mount that attaches to the top of the fence with a cleat and I'll just add another cleat holder to the top of my HT cabinetry so I can take the screen on and off of there as needed. Not very sophisticated, but elegantly simplicity and most importantly: cheap. When not in use, I'll hang the screen on the back of the cabinetry to get it out of the way. 

Sure; eventually, I'll need to pick up an actual HD level projector like this JVC D-ILA unit, but that's down the road. For now, I have a really cheap solution to having an actual big-screen  in our system.

 

What does this have to do with my son's birthday? It seems pretty straight-forward, right? Well.... it did give me a chance to compare his rig to what his friends were using and also to think ahead a little. My son's machine is built in this Azza CSAZ-103 which, two years ago was fairly forward-thinking if not cutting edge. It's "console-sized", could be turned on it's side or placed horizontally, has the now pretty common flat-segmented interior to allow Mini-ITX to be small and slender. However, after the last upgrade to the nVidia GTX-750ti graphic card it's pretty much maxed out for what it's generation (Sandy/Ivy Bridge). When compared to what his friends had though, it's a nice machine and by far the most capable, but you guys know, I'm always thinking about the next thing. 

There is of course, this..... the ever present spectre of the need to upgrade, but that's really not what got my attention. Plus, all upgrades in this house will have to wait in line behind the upgrade of my workstation from Z77/i7/Ivy Bridge to X99/i7 Hexacore/Haswell E has finished some time this summer. 

No; the rabbit hole I went down as a result of his party was this.... As you guys know, gaming in a "mobile" sense is still a difficult proposition.... at least if you want to do it inexpensively. One of the little hassles we had to deal with while prepping for his party was that 2 (not including him) of his friends do their gaming on desktops. We were lucky in that I have random monitors sitting around, so they could just bring their "tower", keyboard and mouse. Two others had laptops which they constantly complained about which highlighted the fact that our decision to build his in small-form desktop as being correct. Anyway; helping his friends get their computers set up and going got me thinking. His machine is actually small enough to put in an equipment/tool case and still have room to hold a monitor if I did a little modification.....

Can you say: Future Lan Party, HERE WE COME!?!