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Reusing Laptop LCDs for DIY Projects?
eaddict asks: "I have just purchased over 20 older laptops. These laptops are old Toshiba Satellite CS110, Acer 350P, and IBM Thinkpad 365Xs. Most have bad floppies, damaged cases, and no battery. When I power them up all the displays look decent. So now I wanna hack and play.
I am trying to figure our how to reuse the laptop screens so I can use them to build things like: a combined larger display, an automobile display for a DVD player, photo frames, and other nifty ideas." This question is a replay from about 2 years ago. What hardware will you need to drive a single screen (once it's been severed from the laptop corpse), or a group of them, as mentioned above?
Well, its got weirdo wiring. Trust me. You can get the converter boards for a FEW LCD's, but at $199-399 each, it removes any monetary advantage to using these.
Trust me, i wish it could be done, too. Pick up an old Thinkpad chassis for 30 bucks off eBay, a bit of soldering, and you'd have a monitor. In a perfect world.
Hey Taco! Looks like you're using the "infinite monkeys and typewriters" scheme to generate Ask Slashdots again...
Right here.
This version is only good enough for 8-color text mode, and only works with TFT displays.
LCD (TFT) panels aren't really that different from normal VGA monitors, the R,G,B signals are n-bit digital rather than analog and you need to supply a pixel clock... that pixel clock should be derived from the video signal using a PLL, but this simple circuit uses a fixed crystal oscillator instead because I had one handy. I'll post an improved circuit at a later date.
To turn the panel into a digital photo frame you could probably use a Flash ROM (and a RAM if the ROM is too slow to read out at the correct pixel rate), and some basic digital electronics (either a bunch of discrete counters etc, or a CPLD).
When I power them up all the displays look decent....so I can use them to build things like: a combined larger display, an automobile display for a DVD player, photo frames,
Instead of figuring out how to reuse just the displays, I'd suggest that you're probably much better off trying to figure out how to reuse the entire machine elegantly. For example, in automotive applications, old laptops are great because they're small, they use DC power, and they have a lot of niceties like PCMCIA slots (great for wireless modems).
Photo frames are another good example - you can build a table with the laptop guts mounted underneath and the flat panel displayed under the glass top. Pick up a couple of cheap wireless network cards, and presto, you've got a network of photo frames that can be automatically refreshed remotely.
Trying to reuse a bunch of different LCD's is going to be a really tough road. If you bought a set of identical ones, at least you wouldn't be doing so much research, but if you keep the machines intact then you're well on your way to finishing cooler projects faster.
What's your damage, Heather?
Their site is at www.earthlcd.com. They have quite a few panels and the requisite converters for them. I've never bought anything from them but they have some cool stuff.
You should be able to use this with a standard PC by creating a PC to mini-PCI bridge. Prepare to do lots and lots of soldering.
For any working laptops, I'd rather grab the whole thing and just run an extra X server on 'em though. Let it display a few extra apps for you, and go ahead and use samba to use the drive as a safe place for quick data backups. Pretty cool, and a hell of a lot less work! :)
Says the RIAA: When you EQ, you're stealing bass!