Gadget Factory

Papilio Pro Breathes New Life Into Old Laptop Display

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hoppasaurus


Papilio Pro user James Glanville recently posted a great project that he’s been working on, over at the Gadget Factory forums. He was nice enough to share his code and some photos for the project, in which he has got his Papilio Pro hooked up to an old laptop LCD display that he had sitting around the workshop.

Here’s an excerpt from James’ project, as posted on the forums:

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.

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.

James points out that this really is a great way to get a display going for your Papilio for next to nothing – discarded laptop LCDs are pretty easy to come by! If you don’t have one, maybe think about swinging by your local hackerspace or thrift store.

We’ve got you covered in the details department:

Thanks for sharing your project with us James!  It’s great to see you guys repurposing components that would otherwise be taking up space in the landfill.  And keep sending in those projects, folks!

(via the forums)

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