Are LCD panels interchangeable - Hardware Hacking General

I have an idea for a project that requires a large panel to be attached to a small phone, does any one know if this is possible.
I know from previous projects that the galaxy line phones seem to have similar cables and connectors but , for example, could I plug a note screen into a GS2? I know the ribbons wont be in the right place and it will be bodged together but that isn't important. What is important is will they physically connect??
My hardware knowledge is good but by software side not so good. I know that android is capable of adapting to different resolutions but will this work "out the box" or will the resolution need changing in the build,prop, or maybe more??
any ideas on this please share, I think this is quite an exciting project that I will share and colabarate with if it is feasable. Its still at the rough concept stage at the moment and I am just checking out the theory behind it so please share your knolage and experience

Possible, but not easy
add.thebad said:
I have an idea for a project that requires a large panel to be attached to a small phone, does any one know if this is possible.
I know from previous projects that the galaxy line phones seem to have similar cables and connectors but , for example, could I plug a note screen into a GS2? I know the ribbons wont be in the right place and it will be bodged together but that isn't important. What is important is will they physically connect??
My hardware knowledge is good but by software side not so good. I know that android is capable of adapting to different resolutions but will this work "out the box" or will the resolution need changing in the build,prop, or maybe more??
any ideas on this please share, I think this is quite an exciting project that I will share and colabarate with if it is feasable. Its still at the rough concept stage at the moment and I am just checking out the theory behind it so please share your knolage and experience
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It is feasible, lots of screens use similar interfaces (parallel TTL, MIPI, LVDS, etc.) so the trick is finding a display with the same interface as your phone already has. You will then need to make a board to adapt from the flex cable you have to the flex cable on your new screen. On that board you will probably also need to provide power since the new screen will consume more power. You will then need to modify the kernel, bootloader and Android to set the correct timing and resolution. (Timing, pinout and resolution for Linux kernel and U-Boot and resolution and DPI for Android) Shoot me a PM, I do this kind of stuff as a consultant and I am happy to give you some pointers!

Related

Replacing Shift Radio board with another one Possible!!!

okay under the instructions of our valused member Cmonex we have now opened this discussion as a food for thought
the begining of the conversation was here http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=2480768#post2480768 and now from there we continue
cmonex said:
there is no such thing as "standard WM drivers". drivers are hardware specific.
for god's sake why would you think it is based on the advantage? the processor and everything else is different. the closest is a kaiser but the LCD and some other things are of course n ot the same.
Please open a new thread to discuss this.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
well i assumed that the board would be advantage because they both have spinning hard drive and maybe because i own an advantage will am willing to donate in the name of sience for such a cause other wise if someone who opened shift can tell us what he thinks of this as we can simpley replace that board with this one, the only 2 things that i assume would be hard is
2. the hardware button that switched between OS's
3. the sdcard slot, in which i assume with some soldering to unify the 2 boards it would work fine (hardware side but software i dunno
Rabia said:
okay under the instructions of our valused member Cmonex we have now opened this discussion as a food for thought
the begining of the conversation was here http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=2480768#post2480768 and now from there we continue
well i assumed that the board would be advantage because they both have spinning hard drive and maybe because i own an advantage will am willing to donate in the name of sience for such a cause other wise if someone who opened shift can tell us what he thinks of this as we can simpley replace that board with this one, the only 2 things that i assume would be hard is
2. the hardware button that switched between OS's
3. the sdcard slot, in which i assume with some soldering to unify the 2 boards it would work fine (hardware side but software i dunno
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Can you explain to me why you would want to place the advantage board in the shift? Whats the use of that?
I dont get the point.
And no, I dont think it is plausible (possible)
not advantage, we are just saying what if, so we can use full mobile strength and not software solutions
Rabia said:
not advantage, we are just saying what if, so we can use full mobile strength and not software solutions
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Its kinda funny how big companies always screw up their stuff...
PS3 = only 256MB ram
Xbox360 = No BT and WIFI
Willcom D4 = only PHS
Shift = Crippled...
sad sad, isnt it?
I would be lying if I say I havent thought about swapping the CPU and I spent hours searching for ram...
i gave up....now my machine is sitting there, waiting for the SHIFT PROJECT
yes your 100% right, but swapping CPU and Ram is harder than swapping a whole Radio Board, just think of it, any HTC (kaiser for example) just mount it in a place inside the shift (after freeying the old space takin by radio) and just figure out how to connect the display, even better since shift has vga, get an advantage or one of those htc with VGA out pout and connect it from within, this is defenatly a project am doing 365 days from now or the second HTC will have a product i will buy (in this case a none crippled SHift), the more input we get from those who have looked inside it and looked inside other HTC's, personally i know how does wallaby, himalaya, jamin, jasjar, advantage look like, i have opened all and usually this is what i do in anything get, the second i the warranty ware off i strip it down to learn
You can't do that. Take a look at the FCC pics and notice the board differences.
well i looked and didn't make any sense earlier but should it be housed exactly the same, would't any radio board that fits withen the space in the shift just do the job?
No, it's connected through a proprietary connector, which you don't have in any other PDA Phone. Also you're not taking into account the Embedded Controller which allows sharing the touchscreen, keyboard, etc, between both systems. See the attached pictures.
oh now that i didn't look at, the controller that would share those things together, though after seeing the board its a close reminder of qtek 1010 or qtek 9090, i assumed that display belt is connected through the MB and keyboard is input is through a shipset like advantage with just keys being remappted throught SW, that what would i do if i was HTC coz then this would just save loads of production line equipment, this is stupid though, SDcard is connected though radio board but works with Main MB, it means almost a year from now we actually might have a full usable mobile, what scare me though is the Bluetooth Shipset, where is located to your knowledge?, i know whats going to happen in the first few realeses, phone will be working only while vista is on to be able to use WIFI and BT for audio routing and VOIP from phone board, then slowly they will become independant again (i guess)
Rabia said:
yes your 100% right, but swapping CPU and Ram is harder than swapping a whole Radio Board, just think of it, any HTC (kaiser for example) just mount it in a place inside the shift (after freeying the old space takin by radio) and just figure out how to connect the display, even better since shift has vga, get an advantage or one of those htc with VGA out pout and connect it from within, this is defenatly a project am doing 365 days from now or the second HTC will have a product i will buy (in this case a none crippled SHift), the more input we get from those who have looked inside it and looked inside other HTC's, personally i know how does wallaby, himalaya, jamin, jasjar, advantage look like, i have opened all and usually this is what i do in anything get, the second i the warranty ware off i strip it down to learn
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Ram isnt that difficult to swap. You can just get a different module, since its not soldered.
Unfortunately, there are only 512MB and 1GB modules commercially available, but give it time and you can purchase 2GB.
About the CPU, nowadays, CPUs are not soldered onto the board like on the VAIO T1 to T5 series. They are glued.
My mate is soldering prototype PCBs for a living. He showed me how he glues SMDs onto the board.
So, you can change them, but its risky to pop the chip off.
But then again, will the BIOS reckognize it? How about power consumption and heat dissipation....maybe not worth the effort.
after looking at the scheme i think other than the keyboard loss its pretty doable, they are completly seperate, other than the display, which i assume the red circled connector is the one for it, i also assume the black and white are for power, other than the keyboard nothing is connected (which i assume the green circled connector is what shares the keyboard and power on etc

G1 Guts + external display?

Hey guys, I'd appreciate your input on this idea.
I have a G1 that was run over by a car. The screen is, of course, completely broken, but the rest of the hardware works properly (charges, adb, etc.).
I also have an old Asus S5n laptop with an awesomely thin lcd display, but with a fried video card.
I have relatively no experience with laptop or phone internals, so here is my question:
How plausible would it be to build a G1-powered tablet using the provided hardware along with a touch panel kit and perhaps a modified android kernel?
getting the Asus screen to display the output of the G1 phone will be a miracle and if it is done...ur probable half way there.
good luck with that
Soo... the only ways I can think about going about doing this is getting a proper LVDS driver for the laptop display (quite possible but expensive [$200+]) and then getting the video output from the G1. I'm not sure that's possible but I remember seeing someone somewhere doing that... could be wrong (hopefully).
Even if you were able to do all of that, you would be lacking input as the touchscreen wouldn't really be augment-able.
Either way, good luck with your project1

[Galaxy S] 3x Stratosphere, all broken screens; uses? Solderable TV-out?

So I had bought three Stratospheres for cheap (bundle auction), hoping that I'd be able to pick up another cheaply with a good screen or bad glass+good LCD. However, beings I've not taken one apart to that extreme I wasn't aware how hard it'd be to separate those pieces At any rate, they all work fine otherwise, I know at least 2 boot to Android since I eventually get the haptic vibration indicating it'd reached the unlock screen. I had also hoped that at the very least the Wiki would've been right about HDMI out, but it's hard to find out what all have full support (the Epic 4G [D700] I got instead for example has it mostly but no one's able to get it working).
New screens cost the same as a working Strat, and seeing as I already bought an Epic after finding that out, I'm wondering what to do with these. I love tinkering, so being able to solder in a Composite, VGA, DVI, HDMI video connector and use it as a self-powered Stick Computer would be seriously awesome.
I'll gladly take hi-res PCB photos, with a DSLR and ample (non reflecting) light, if folks want to help tackle this Hell, for that matter... if you've got the know-how and want give it a try, I will give you one of these Strats to see what you can figure out. These aren't like the Epic as far as PCB goes, either. That Epic is very tiny and a fraction of the phone's size, but these Strats are pretty much the full phone's length and width, so lots to play with lol
Anyways, hope someone knows a thing or two and we can figure a hack out!
Thanks.
EDIT: This just came to me...What about something like these, in conjunction with a ROM (preferably Odin flashable) that has USB Hub support?
http://www.monoprice.com/products/subdepartment.asp?c_id=101&cp_id=10114#1011403
Unfortunately it isn't driverless, BUT it does list Linux support, at least on the VGA model! More than I'd like to spend given the project, but we can call that Plan Y (Plan Z being: buy a new screen lol)
Ez way - how about flashing with some latest ROM and enabling tvout (with help of screenshots from DDMS)
Then you can connect any cheap stuff decoding pal/secam and maybe an otg keyboard/mouse + power chord through hub or straight to the batt slot.
The tryhard way - you could try to exploit screen flex slot. You should find 16/24bit rgb dpi'ish interfrace there + 2 i2c/spi busses and some gpios. Maybe utilising it as 16bit rgb going to sort of converting circuit could leave you with like ~15gpio pins for mostly any kind of stuff u want (spi, i2c, irqs). You need a good breakout for that and gotta consider high frequency layout (as rule of thumb, try to make wires between consecutive ICs as short as possible and equal length)
Capabilities and possibilities are unlimited. Just human's imagination and life is.
Id be careful with usb-dvi converters. Might work. Might not. Check with otg keyboard or smth first.
Rebellos said:
Ez way - how about flashing with some latest ROM and enabling tvout (with help of screenshots from DDMS)
Then you can connect any cheap stuff decoding pal/secam and maybe an otg keyboard/mouse + power chord through hub or straight to the batt slot.
The tryhard way - you could try to exploit screen flex slot. You should find 16/24bit rgb dpi'ish interfrace there + 2 i2c/spi busses and some gpios. Maybe utilising it as 16bit rgb going to sort of converting circuit could leave you with like ~15gpio pins for mostly any kind of stuff u want (spi, i2c, irqs). You need a good breakout for that and gotta consider high frequency layout (as rule of thumb, try to make wires between consecutive ICs as short as possible and equal length)
Capabilities and possibilities are unlimited. Just human's imagination and life is.
Id be careful with usb-dvi converters. Might work. Might not. Check with otg keyboard or smth first.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
So TVOut on the does actually Stratosphere work? (with a custom ROM, I mean)
You happen to know where to find such a ROM? I know that XDA doesn't have a Strat subforum I've looked high and low, and can barely find custom ROMs, let alone one that's TVout lol Everything is still Gingerbread based, but I suspect that doesn't matter since the hardware is from that time.
As for the latter, I actually hadn't realized that without a screen, I'd be without a MOUSE haha I was totally focused on it having a slider keyboard and somehow missed I'd still need a mouse Nevertheless, doing it myself would be pretty hard :\ I don't know that much about the finer details of hardware, at least circuits of that complexity. Modding an analog audio circuit with new capacitors or an OpAmp is one thing, but that's straight forward In-Out, Power-Ground lol
That isn't to say I wouldn't attempt it but I'm not sure exactly what would be needed. If it's LVDS, I do have an older 15" laptop screen that'd be cool to hack a Strat to use :cyclops: That's adding a bit more complexity to things though, at least to start with right out of the gate.
Sadly I dont know where to get Strat ROM. But I assumed that its HW is pretty much the same as I9000, except the additional keyboard, so aries kernel with patches might/should/could work. There shouldnt be any major problems in porting it. I would get these crappy Sammy sources for I405 and I9000, diff them and try to apply diff on kernel_samsung_aries repo of CM.
About TVOut - it is matter of one or two gate ICs and a jack sensing onboard, as S5PC110 has built in tvout signal generator. So I would expect HW to support it.
Edit: There should be some tvout handling in original kernel sources if it is supported. Though, knowing Sammy, there might be aswell tvout driver enabled but HW not wired at all to support it.

HDMI Input to Tablet LCD

I am looking at doing a project where you take the LCD from an Android tablet (I have an old SCH-I905); and add an HDMI input to it so it can be used as a monitor. I have no experience with how I would even get started on this; besides the 3+ days of Googling that resulted in nothing. I would very much appreciate if someone from the community had something to offer! From some research, what I could see that would maybe do the trick is using some sort of LCD controller board.
Thank you.
do yo know how to operate LCD controller of your SCH-I905? i think if you just want to use your device as an external monitor that you can use 3rd software to do it.
I am interested to know if you have found a way
I'm interested on projects like this. I want to put a female hdmi to lcd or the board or something like that, to view on tv, ie: watch videos without using screen mirroring (for older lcd tv's), playing games in real time (without cuts), youtube, and many more things. If anyone knows about it, please let me know.
Best regards
Im also looking for the same thing. I actually wanna find a way to make my old phone into a notebook. My old notebook motherboard has broke, so i wanna try to transform my phone into the notebook itself using the hardware that is left. I'm pretty sure i wont make it, but ita worth the shot.

Help! connect phone directly to hdmi monitor (replace touch screen).

Hello folks,
I guess this is the most appropriate subforum to ask this kind of question.
I'm having a broken screen Samsung Galaxy Note 5. And instead of find a touch screen replacement, I want to just get rid of the screen entirely
and instead connect the board to external monitor via hdmi interface preferrably. I believe the part that connect the touch screen is called "LCD fpc connector", correct me if I'm wrong.
So I guess I need something like an adapter that convert "fpc connector" to "hdmi connector".
The question is, is this hack possible? can the phone board output to hdmi monitor at all?
If yes then how to do it properly.
Please englighten me, I'm a total noob on this
Many thanks!
Hey huannb,
I also wanted this badly enough to stumble upon your post. From the light research i have done so far, it seems like this is a project only for those who have well labeled board diagrams and a deep understanding of LCD driver technologies.
FPC stands for "Flexible PCB Connector" and it's usage is ubiquitous in the small form-factor electronics space. If you are working with a FPC connector, you are probably handling a one-of-a-kind engineered interface. There are some hardware hackers who have achieved great feats such as THIS JAPANESE HARDWARE HACKER who build a driver board to adapt iPad retina displays to HDMI. I haven't stumbled on a write-up depicting and FPC interface to HDMI conversion yet. If you find one, please post it here because i would like to meet the person responsible for making it.
The way i see it, we have two choices from here. Reverse engineer a device and build a snowflake adapter which only works on one device, OR recycle the device and continue to live within the realm of consumer hardware.
kipziptie said:
Hey huannb,
I also wanted this badly enough to stumble upon your post. From the light research i have done so far, it seems like this is a project only for those who have well labeled board diagrams and a deep understanding of LCD driver technologies.
FPC stands for "Flexible PCB Connector" and it's usage is ubiquitous in the small form-factor electronics space. If you are working with a FPC connector, you are probably handling a one-of-a-kind engineered interface. There are some hardware hackers who have achieved great feats such as THIS JAPANESE HARDWARE HACKER who build a driver board to adapt iPad retina displays to HDMI. I haven't stumbled on a write-up depicting and FPC interface to HDMI conversion yet. If you find one, please post it here because i would like to meet the person responsible for making it.
The way i see it, we have two choices from here. Reverse engineer a device and build a snowflake adapter which only works on one device, OR recycle the device and continue to live within the realm of consumer hardware.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hi,
Thank you very much for your insight, it is super helpful and somewhat deep enough for me .
It does seem to involve quite a lot of hacking and there isn't a universal approach.
For my case, it is not worth the effort anymore, I have found a way to use most android mobiles to external monitor without fixing the screen itself without much complications.
I doubt that I can find anyone competent enough to explore this realm any further .
Thank you so much again for your research. Cheers

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