Making Use Of Old LCDs?

phorm writes "Not so long ago, higher-definition LCD's used to be quite hard to come by, with laptops and other hardware tending to use old non-TFT-style LCD's which ugly bleeding colors and poor refresh. Nowadays, almost everything has a nice TFT (Thin-film-transistor) display, including laptops, PDA's, digital camera, and often even cellphones. However, not all of these devices are as dependable as they once were, and many of them end up as little more than paperweights. With TFT-LCD's by themselves still being somewhat of a pricey commodity, is there any way to salvage and use these parts for home projects? I personally have an 8" notebook display, and a 1.5" digital camera LCD which are just begging to be recycled as something useful such as a projector component, status display, or something else useful. So far I've had little luck discovering a way to get these components to work outside of the original hardware, so I was wondering if any enterprising hardware-nerds on Slashdot have had better luck than I and could offer a few pointers. Are these components doomed to end up in a landfill, or can somebody offer a way to make them useful again?"

Comments

Great Uses

[Johnny Doughnuts]

Car mp3 Player Display
Attach to side of monitor for a small second monitor
Write a linux driver to interface directly with the lcd, and GPL it, along with specs.

I *would* imagine you could come up with a variety of uses, since you are a /. reader, but because you decided to make the front page, I hereby revoke your /. UID.

Re:You could build a video projector

[Clockwork Apple]

He didnt say he wanted to make a consumer quality device, he just asked what he could use the LCD for. Regular TV is well below the 800x600 that the LCD probably is.

I have a DIY PJ built from a multimedia LCD and a overhead projector. Its just 640 x480 but at 5 foot wide it looks better than some rear projection screens I have seen. YMMV ;)

Pictures.

[qualico]

I think a great use would be to have a picture frame on a wall with a recycled LCD screen rotating pictures like WebShots.

Trouble is its *not* going to be a simple matter to interface the unit with electronics unless your an e-wizard.

An older laptop should be no trouble.

Here is a great link if your a Linux lover like me.
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/computers/articl e/0,1 2543,600338,00.html

Re:Pictures.

[mopslik]

Looks like your link got monkied up with that space in there. Here's a working one:

Display Your Digital Wonderland

E-Bay it

[DigiShaman]

Seriously! I once bought a busted laptop from someone for $200 (I needed spare parts). But I didn't need the LCD. So I sold it on E-bay and got $320 for the screen alone!

Yes, those LCDs are quite profitable if you know were to look.

Whole machine as Linux + X or ASCII terminal

[billstewart]

Trying to salvage just the screen may be difficult. But often there's more of the original machine left than that, and you can find ways to use it efficiently. For instance, that 486-66 laptop is now too slow and lame to run any games other than D00m or Nethack, and the 500MB disk doesn't look so huge any more, and maybe the case is cracked and the keyboard doesn't work, but you may still be able to run enough Debian on it to get X to work so you can have it as an extra display device. If you want to hide most of the mechanism, you may be able to separate the display part of the case and just run longer wires to the base part, leaving the electronics intact. And maybe it can double as a print server as well.

Similarly, if you've got a laptop that's too lame for that, you might still be able to run Windows 3.1 and hyperterm on it, so you've got a scrolling ASCII display for data you feed it on the RS232 port, or maybe VNC running at 112 kbps. It's not your hot-stuff gamez box, but it's enough to display status information, and the great thing about a 386/25 is that you can be Entirely Fearless about performaing dangerous operations on it because there's really no downside risk :-)

PDAs can often run communications programs as well, so you can use the RS232 port to feed them ASCII streams to display. That Palm3 stand can sit neatly on top of your main PC, showing you whatever information you think is interesting in whatever font size you can read. Maybe it's just a clock and weather forecast and network intrusion detection display ("It's 3:32pm, 37 degrees outside, pollen count high, Virus of the Day is Netsky.U".)

Re:Whole machine as Linux + X or ASCII terminal

[selfabuse]

I just did something along those lines. I had an old thinkpad, and a couple old k6-2 machines, tossed debian and cinelerra on them, and had myself a 6 machine renderfarm out of things I was about to throw in the dumpster. That doesn't get you using the LCD at all, but could get you using a machine you'd trash otherwise.

Re:Whole machine as Linux + X or ASCII terminal

[dasunt]

The parent poster wrote:

...that 486-66 laptop is now too slow and lame to run any games other than D00m or Nethack...

What more do you need? ;)

Btw, 486-586 era laptops make kick-ass x86 firewalls. Energy consumption is a lot better then a desktop, and they tend to be compact, with a built-in keyboard and video. 2 PCMCIA/Cardbus NICs and you're set.

Re:Whole machine as Linux + X or ASCII terminal

[TheLink]

Not only that, some still have a working built-in 2 hour+ UPS :).

Pentium M = 6+ hour UPS. Turn off screen+backlight and woohoo.

yeah, but maybe here's an idea.....

[SethJohnson]

I fully agree. Frequently 'ask slashdot' topics are pretty blantantly solved with a google search.

But in this case, perhaps some community brainstorming could bring fresh ideas to this challenge and we could get some innovation.

For instance, I have an old Quicktake 200 digital camera. That's the very second generation of digital cameras. First one with an LCD. Works fine, but the resolution sucks. If I wanted too, I think I could mount the LCD facing out of the front of my case with the rest of the camera attached. I could create a bunch of images in photoshop that would look like a few meters displaying data (CPU temp, Disk space per disk, fan RPM, bandwidth utilization). Each image is the same, but the values on each meter change a bit between the frames. Store all the pics on a smart media card and load them into the camera. Set it on slideshow or just 'play'.

I could even probably connect wires to the buttons (switches) on the camera to control the slideshow from my computer via some kind of X10-like controller interface.

Take that idea one step further: Figure out how to wire a USB card reader into the contacts where the camera reads from the smart media card. Plug the USB cable into the computer and somehow create a virtual memory card for the camera to read from. Bingo. You can now dynamically generate the images the camera can read in the slideshow mode. Now you've got a real version of the fake display I was describing above.

This is a kind of workaround to interfacing a controller to an LCD screen. Use the existing controller and hijack the data that's being sent to the screen...

Re:Yeah but...

[Halfbaked Plan]

I've built tons of prototypes and breadboards. Haven't burned myself with a soldering iron in decades. If you're burning yourself with the soldering iron, maybe you're cut out to be an engineer, not a technician. Let's see how badly you can damage the breadboard Friday night at 9 PM (after everybody else has gone home) by innocently trying to move two wires...

Way to make them useful again

[phorm]

I wasn't asking for ideas with which to re-use the parts... as you might guess I've got lots of those. I'm asking for assistance in making them useful. As in, there's a perfectly good TFT LCD on that dead laptop... I'd love to use it for something else ... but I'll be damned if I have any idea how to make it function outside of the (dead) laptop, or if that is even possible.

Re:You could build a video projector

[scdeimos]

Actually, since it's an analogue signal, the "effective" horizontal resolution of television signals is limited only by the bandwidth of the luminance and chroma circuits of your receiver/TV and tends to be much higher than the popular 768x576 (PAL/SECAM, 50i) and 640x480 (NTSC, 60i) resolutions offered on capture cards.

Those resolutions were chosen to maintain the 4:3 aspect ratio used on computer monitors based on the number of "useful" lines in the signal (the rest of the lines are used for framing of the front-porch/back-porch and digital data like Teletext).

The 720x480 NTSC resolution made available on some cards makes use of some of this extra resolution, but confuses a number of players because the aspect ratio written in the .AVI/.MPEG streams aren't handled reliably (by either capture or playback software it seems, although some do it better than others).

Opel display

[Visser]

The Opel (Vauxhall) display can easily be interfaced to a PIC microcontroller. See www.eelkevisser.nl for more information.

http://www.maxivista.com/

[jbeall]

http://www.maxivista.com/ This is a piece of software that you can stick on a notebook (or any computer for that matter), and then use as if it were anothe monitor. You need a wired network connection, though, or be willing to accept crummy refresh rates w/ WiFi.

Re:Yeah but...

[illumin8]

I have a bunch of PowerBook 170's and 180's...

Turn them into digital picture frames. This gentleman turned his PowerBook 100 into a Digital Picture Frame for relatively little cost. If I had a leftover PowerBook that would be one of my first projects.

Re:You could build a video projector

[worktheweb]

Actually, the NTSC standard specifies 525 lines at 60 fields a second. A field is an interlaced half of a frame, so that's 30 frames a second. Anything above 525 that and you're just interpolating -- it may look nice, but you're not getting any more signal.