Do you feel like having more real estate with your laptop screen? Wouldn’t it be fascinating if we told you that you could attach your iPad’s LCD screen to it as additional screen that would perfectly well with your laptop? Oh no, we are so not talking about the Air Display – we are talking about plugging the screen in via the USB port and using the laptop with more freedom than you have ever done before.
A typical iPad LCD on eBay will cost you around $50 and you would be surprised to know that they come with a display port interface. Why is it such a great thing? Because now all you need to is to the splice the ribbon connector into a display port cable, throw a backlight driver in the mix and the display can be used with any computer.
You’ll need to buy a pre-made breakout board (unless you want to make one yourself) and a backlight driver along with it as well. This will cost you about $35. If you power it only via the USB, you’ll notice that only one half of the backlight is lit. Now adjusting the brightness will result in current demand going to 600mA and to counter that, you’ll need to replace the stock resistors with the ones that can cater for the 600mA current.
The next issue to tackle is how do you provide 600mA since the USB 2.0 maxes out at 500mA.
The key is to fool your computer into thinking that the plugged in device is a USB 3.0 high power device and for that you’ll need to go and buy $10 external USB 3.0 hard drive enclosure. Add jumpers between the LCD driver board and the power pins on the enclosure board and you are good to go. The final result will look something like the picture that is given below.
A pretty cool DIY trick, isn’t it?
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