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?

Comments

What to say when you power them up

[commodoresloat]

"Main Screen Turn On"

reusing laptops

[Anonymous Coward]

I've always wondered if it was possible to actually reuse the entire laptop. I have several higher powered computers (P3 1+GHz) in the house and I also have several low powered laptops (486 or so) what I do not have, however is space. What would be great is to use the old laptops as a complete system for the desktops, keyboard, trackpad/eraser head pointer and lcd. I know that I could install linux on them and user vnc to control the windows boxes and just export the x displays from the linux boxes, but the laptops are very slow, and very low on memory and hard drive space, one of which does not even have a cdrom. Would be much nicer to just have a single cable running into the laptop that let me use th laptop to control the PC