Makington

DIY Second Monitor

I made this secondary monitor out of a salvaged laptop screen and a driver board off ebay. It's pretty simple, but very useful. Eventually, I may tidy it up, but right now it's rockin' that electro-junk look.

How I made it

a short tale

One day around the time I was in middle school, I was at my friend's house, and we were looking for something to do. He had a couple of old laptops in his closet, so we decided to take one apart. We sat there removing screw after screw until we had reduced the machine to its component parts. At the time, I didn't know the screen could be useful on its own, so at the end of the day when we split the treasure, so to speak, I made off with a wifi card, camera module, and some other miscellaneous bits.

Perhaps a few months later, I stumbled across a video on youtube showing the re-use of an old laptop screen with a driver board off ebay, and I thought back to my friend's old screen. Eventually I told him I'd found a way to use the screen again, and I asked him if he still had it. He said he did, and that he wasn't using it, so I could have it if I wanted. So I hopped on my bike and rode over to get it. We pulled it out of the closet, I thanked him, and then biked home with a bare laptop screen across my handlebars, wondering what passers-by might think.

The next step was to order the correct driver board for the screen.
So I found the correct board on ebay (based on the screen's part number) and did just that.

After waiting for it to arrive, which didn't take too long, it was simply a matter of plugging the bits together. Initially, I didn't have that nice chunk of recycled wood as a base, so I pearched the LCD on a haphazard pile of bits of metal and some of the inside of a Roomba. When I first turned it on and plugged it in, there were vertical green lines across the whole screen, and I was worried I was going to have to do some hardcore debugging. It was therefore a pleasant suprise when I turned it on the next day and it worked pefectly, which it has done ever since.
The old off-and-on-again saves the day once more!

Now, over a decade later, the improvised device still serves me well. Here it is in 2020 in my fabled Basement Lair.

You know, looking at this image now, I realize how much of an I Spy my workspace was...