Reusing Laptop LCDs for DIY Projects?

Posted by Cliff on Monday May 20, 2002 @08:11PM from the LCD-deja-vu dept.

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?

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Re:Simple DIY VGA-LCD converter by cyr · 2002-05-21 01:23 · Score: 3, Insightful

Well, it's mostly a "proof-of-concept" kind of thing... I wanted to see if it was possible to do with such a simple circuit. Being able to support (scale) different resolutions would be a *lot* more difficult, but that may not be a problem depending on what you wish to do.

The propagation delay isn't much of a problem, at least not compared to the jitter caused by having a fixed clock that isn't exactly matched to the VGA card pixel clock.

I plan an improved version using a PLL for the clock, proper (adjustable) centering of the image and maybe "real" ADCs for full color (maybe some free samples from Maxim...).