Yeah, so why should you buy high tech toys when you can build your own? This is a very sweet project I hope to see other people try this as well.

"This is hybrid screen/graphics tablet which makes me drool. The price however makes me weep, £2000ish for the 20" version. They also do a thing called the PL at 17" for a more reasonable £500ish. Occasionally they appear on the site in their bargain basement ex-demo section. Still hard for me to justify though.

Then I had one of those "spang" moments. None of the tech involved is new and all is readily available second hand, it’s just a matter of putting it together. My Wacom at work will happily operate with the stylus off the surface, after that it’s just an LCD screen, right? Anyhow where’s the fun in just buying something?

Experiment - what depth does a tablet work to? Stack of paper says 9mm before accuracy starts to suffer noticeably. An LCD with an EL film backlight has to be thinner than that.

So here’s the challenge, What is the least amount of money I can build a Cintiq style device for?

[via MAKE] 

DIY Cintiq