My Dads Compaq Presio 1700 just died, and after saving a few parts to sell on ebay he let me dismantle it. I took apart the caseing around the screen and found two wires labled high voltage, which i asume are for the flourecent back lighting, and one strip of many wires that ran to the mother board. Is there some converter i could or make converter Video in and out to the strip of wires?
some converter i could GET or make*
The 'strip of wires' you refer to is the connection to the LCD display.
Since LCD TVs use the same kind of displays as computer LCDs it is indeed theoretically possible to make the display work in that way. It's not a trivial task though ! Certainly beyond the typical hobbyist level.
Graham
Ok, the two wires are indeed the backlight. In the rest of the laptop, you should find the inverter somewhere, that generates the high voltage from a low voltage dc source.
The strip of wires contains most likely : - The TFT power - Some LVDS pairs for the data transmission.
To display a TV image you need a video decoder chip that will transform the composite/s-video signal into some digital stream. Unfortunatly, the format is not compatible at all and you need a "glue" chip to store that stream into a frame buffer and output the frame buffer into a LVDS encoder (TI does some of theses chips, done especially for screens like that).
Also, the TFT power might need to be applied in some specific sequence to avoid damaging the screen.
Indeed, not that easy and probably not that cheap to build by yourself ... Starting from a VGA sources might be easier as you would only need DACs, maybe a CPLD for the logic, and a LVDS encoder. No need for storing frames etc ...
Sylvain
I have already found the inverter. It is an entirely seperate chip with a plastic sleve around it. While i'm on the topic of the inverter, it has four input wires, black green white red, in that order. I can assume that red and black are positive and negative, but what are the white and green ones? If this helps, I just counted the pins that strip of wire connected to, it was a flat 20 pin socket.
Follow this link, it's ebay, but it's the inverter I have.
From the level of knowledge exhibited in your post, it's likely that it would take you significantly over a year, learning several hours a day to do this. It is not at all simple, unfortunately.
Well, I have no clue ;) Without "seeing" the thing I can do much. I guess they must be some kind of control signals to allow backlight control. Maybe just poweron the laptop and put a scope on it to "see" what's going on.
Or just find a reference ID on it and google for it.
The reference number of the panel would be more useful ;)
An educated guess would be that you have 4 LVDS pairs 3 for data, 1 for clock. The rests are all power/ground.
Sylvain
The inverter is the easy bit. Power this, and you get a blank white (or dull grey more likely) screen. And that's all it does.
It might be easier to sell the display and use the money buy one of those small LCD flat-screen TeeVee's that double as a monitor. They are about USD
199 (no, you won't get that but .. what you are proposing is not trivial and will cost more in any case).ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.