Using an old laptop display

May 7, 2013

JamesGlanville drives an old laptop monitor with his Papilio Pro!
Hi, I've been playing with my ppro, and have got it talking to an old laptop lcd I had. I was amazed at how easy this was, so I thought I'd post a few pictures and some code. So far it draws a picture of yoshi (stored in rom), and animates a square that grows as it moves.
Original Forum Thread

Hi, I've been playing with my ppro, and have got it talking to an old laptop lcd I had. I was amazed at how easy this was, so I thought I'd post a few pictures and some code. So far it draws a picture of yoshi (stored in rom), and animates a square that grows as it moves. Not very impressive, but I feel like I've laid the groundwork for my next experiments. Most of the hard work was done by this guy: http://g3nius.org/lcd-controller/ The code I modified is here: http://www.filedropper.com/lcd-driver

The yellow cable is just the original cable that would plug into the motherboard, wrapped in heatshrink for strength, with the 4 differential pairs plugging into C8-C15 (You can't plug this into any port, not all of them have a full set of differential pins for LVDS). The black circuit board is a 3.3v step down converter to power the lcd electronics. The brown one is an inverter for the cold cathode backlight (I broke the original by shorting the HV to something). The fan is there because I'm overvolting the inverter (18v instead of 12v), and it gets a little warm without.

Anyways, this is a great way to get a basically free video display, since discarded laptop lcds are really easy to come by.