A New Record

Last night I completed the biggest hack I've ever done.

Some months ago, I bought an industrial 32" LCD monitor from the Logan DI store. They had priced it at $80, but I found that it didn't actually work. While it would display a frame when turned on, the image didn't move at all. I opened it up at the store to have a look and found that the controller board had been messed with at some point by a tech who didn't have a clue and probably used a $2 Radio Shack soldering iron. Since it didn't work, they were going to trash it but I offered $20 in the name of just having the panel for later use since I knew it worked well enough.

And then it got in my way and would continue to do so for a long time until yesterday.

Thursday night, I spied a flat TV sitting behind the local home theater store and wondered if they would let me have it. Yesterday I went in and asked and was allowed to take it. Vizio 37" with a cracked panel and the coax jack ripped out. No tuner love, but there were plenty of inputs to make the project worthwhile.

I plugged the set in at home to see if it would light up and it did, with the interesting patterns that only come from a cracked panel. At least the guts still worked and the viewing angle of the panel had me thinking S-IPS technology. Maybe an LG/Philips panel?

I removed the back panel and had a look around. The LCD panel looked like a larger version of the 32" panel and the power supply and inverter boards were LG branded. LG/Philips panel. Had to be and it was.

So it was time to check pinouts to see if I could hack the two together. The connectors were the same type on the inverters, but the 37" panel had 14 pins on one board where the same had 12 on the 32" panel. Fortunately, reverse-engineering was cake. The 37" panel inverters had a pinout silk-screened onto the boards and, while the 32" panel didn't, it was real easy to figure out because the boards the cable connected to did have silkscreened pinouts.

It took me half an hour to pull and reorganize the pins to the inverters, double-checking my work, but they looked production-grade when I was done. The signal cable for the display was a different matter. It didn't have enough conductors on the controller end so I thought I'd have to use the panel-side board from the 37" panel to make it work. No. After turning the display on and seeing no change then plugging the inverters and seeing a bright blue LED light and then dim on the main inverter board with no backlight action, I figured I'd go back to the original panel-side board and just use the 37" controller-to-panel cable and see what happened.

It would seem that the system was designed to take several configurations because I was startled when it fired up to a blue screen after I plugged the inverter with the power still on. Slight spark from the 24V line and slight flicker from the blue LED.

Blue screen means nothing. I hit the menu button (it was silkscreened as menu, but it was the source switch button) and the OSD came up. The hack worked, but what about taking a signal? Easy was to check. I hooked my Xbox 360 up to the VGA input and went for it.

It worked. I played Saints Row 2 for a couple of minutes to check response time. No problems, solid response. Excellent.

Now how the hell am I going to put it in a case? My work is half done.