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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?
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).