A Fanboy's Note 10_10 Review

1. Why in the world, would you ever want to build your own monitor? I mean there are already a ton of good cheap monitors out there. That would be as good or better than something that you build yourself. In fact, we showed off a few of them recently. Well, the answer lies not necessarily in using this puny little screen as your main display, but rather in giving it a new lease on life as a secondary or even like tertiary display, and the best part is, if you're anything like me and you hoard a bunch Of old technology, you may already have a panel, that's just waiting to be reclaimed from an old, laptop or a tablet. So today, we're gonna show you just how easy it is to make your own monitor from just a couple of cheap parts and a little bit of creativity. Speaking of creativity. How creative is this segue to our sponsor rage, wallet Ridge wallet is a sleek way to keep wallet bulged down with their compact frame and RFID blocking inner plates use, offer code Lynas to save 10 % and get free worldwide shipping today [, Music ]. So first up here is the star of the show the panel, so ours here is probably something you've seen before it's a super common 15.6 inch IPS panel with a resolution of 1920 by 1080. Next up is something you probably haven't seen before. This right here is an embedded DisplayPort controller, which is roughly analogous to the scaler module that you would find in a typical desktop monitor. So this here converts the HDMI signal. That'S coming out of your graphics card into a signal that the panel here can understand. So we purchased both our LCD and our EDP adapter from ebay, but guys before you go out and like buy a screen, take a look on Craigslist or at local electronics recyclers like free geek and see. If you can find something that doesn't need to be shipped. You might be able to score a deal and get some of that bonus karma for keeping a perfectly good screen from going to waste wherever you get your panel once you've got it. The first thing you're gonna want to do is establish what specific connector it uses so the most common connector that you're gonna find on 1080p panels like this one is a 30 pin EDP connector, like the one I'm holding here now. If you do decide to harvest your LCD from a laptop or otherwise make sure to verify that the connector on the back matches with the display adapter that you choose another word of warning. If you plan on using an old iPad or a MacBook, do a little extra research and make sure that you can even find an adapter for it Apple. Has this tendency to use proprietary connectors for their displays? I know I'm shocked moving on now then to the brains of the operation, our display adapter. Now, in addition to acting as a signal converter here, you might notice in there. This provides our on-screen display, which hopefully will allow us to adjust things like screen. Brightness contrast and all that kind of good stuff, it's really easy to gloss over how important this little driver is and even harder to believe that it only 20 bucks. Now that we've got all the components of our display figured out here, but next thing we need to do is be responsible and boot it up and make sure it works before we assemble the whole thing, then we're gonna put it in that frame over there And try and use it as an actual monitor. The golden end goes into the bottom of the monitor, just like that. Just be careful when you're putting these - and these are quite fragile, connectors they're not intended. You know like at like a USB plug to be unplugged and plug back in and all that stuff and then on the other side. We'Ve got a little flip up plastic piece here and then our contacts go down so that they touch the pins on the inside of the connector. We slide it in and then lock it down like that, and do it a lot more evenly than that. That'S better! We found this 12 volt 3 amp power, adapter and a bin know. All I need is my laptop Hey. Well, that was painless. Look at that. I wonder if our OSD works menu and it's in Korean, so with that out of the way all we need now is this little baggie of 256 and 440 screws and nuts. This little knife here for cleaning up our 3d prints, this screwdriver for screwing everything together and in the interest of completeness this power drill that we actually only use just to the the clearances were a little tight on the holes for the on-screen display. So you loosen them a little bit and now it's fine, but I won't actually use that on camera. So for all the details on these parts, guys, you can check out the for link in the description where we have all of the components, the 3d models, the fasteners and where you can find them. If you wanted to do something like this for yourself now, the real bulk of this project was actually getting all these parts printed. The design that we used is from Fox underscore Exe on Thingiverse, so we got to give huge kudos to him for a pretty well thought-out design, especially how the back panels interlock with the EDP adapter case with that being said, the design is clearly marked as being A work in progress, so we did find some areas needed improvements and we've uploaded the remix of his design, for you guys to enjoy so you'll need to print 17 parts in total, so be prepared to spend some time cleaning up 3d prints for this project. As between the successful ones and the less successful ones, they're, probably gonna be quite a few of them, so with all that out of the way we're ready to build so step number one for us is gonna be assembling the base. Now this was one piece that we did have to reassemble and honestly our solution - it's not perfect, but it's functional enough, so you go ahead and you pop the top of the stand in here. Just yeah. There we go and then this loop right here kind of hooks onto it and holds it in place if you want it to hold click for source more securely. What you could do is put a big washer

2. on here and then screw it in from this side and thread that, through the 3d printed hole in the back it'll just kind of self tap in there, and that would hold it better. But honestly, our monitors not heavy enough that we consider that to be an issue, so we're just gonna go ahead and pop that on there boom stand just like that. Next, we're gonna lay down our display panel and we're gonna arrange these four pieces. Like so, you can tell the top pieces from the bottom pieces from the extra little nubbins that they have for the components at the bottom of the panel. We pre-installed the bottom bezel here just because it's a little bit of a pain in the butt, but with some elbow grease, you'll get it on there. I'M just gonna go ahead and pop that on there we go now's a good time to reinstall the ribbon. Cable from the monitor so we're gonna go ahead and pop that on there then we're gonna route it up here, because that's where we're altom utley gonna need it for bonus points. You can do a little bit of cable management here. Have it come out about like so that's gonna make it the finished, install a little bit tidier. Now that we're at this stage we can go ahead and insert our buttons in the rest of the front bezel. So we just go ahead and pop this puppy. On there you go look at that. Do they work, hey nice, alright! So we're gonna throw this on here. There we go and then this piece is a little bit finicky guys but yeah. Let'S make sure that our buttons are all still exposed all right. So we're using our shorter screws here, and these will helpful together our bottom bezel. So now we've put the rest of our backing back in place and we can go ahead and connect our EDP adapter. I'M sure you guys expect nothing less, but I'm gonna mention it anyway. Once again, it's a little bit finicky here as we position our port solemnly corresponding holes. You can see that actually lines up quite nicely, though, and then our ribbon cable, through this gap here in the housing, now that these are installed we're gonna go ahead and flip it around like this. You can see there's a little notch here, where the cables come out. One thing that will help you get this lined up. Is it's gonna be hard to see in the camera, but there's little guides to kind of lock all these pieces in place there we go so theoretically, once they're all in there. It'S not gonna move around too much and it should screw right in then. We get these parts which are gonna attach to our stand, and we put them on right here and it's finally time to screw the thing together with. Hopefully, all those holes aligned and we're gonna use our long screws this time around. So now we can pick it up. You can see it's a little floppy there. That'S why there's these clips, so these go on a little, something like that: Boop and there it is Boop and that for better or for worse, is a monitor. Now, a perfect monitor. No don't be stupid, but it's a monitor now we're gonna take one of our 440 screws and we're gonna put it through here with a nut. On the other side, we need quite a bit of clamping force, which is why we're gonna use a nut, rather than just relying on threading into the 3d filament. Tighten this up, because this is what's gonna keep our monitor from tilting when we don't want it to that, holds on there yeah now, the other side. There we go. Oh, not bad, pretty tight, alright, oh there we go. Ladies and gentlemen, it's a monitor. It'S alive, actually, I don't know if it's alive yet, okay, so let's plug our power, adapter right HDMI goes in hey. Well, that's great! That makes sense, that's cool! These are designed to have the back of the laptop on them, so you can actually see the backlight fire up here. Yeah check it out, give me a sec there. It is it's lit boom secondary, monitor. Just like that. I just note guys the original plan did kind of call for side bezels, but they were either incomplete or we couldn't find them or some combination of the two and all it would really serve to do is put a bigger bezel on us. So we just didn't really worry about it. We do have a bit of a problem, though our brightness low sucks. So fortunately oh it speaking of things that Melissa our menu ain't great, that buttons jammed up. Okay, we never said it was perfect. There we go. Okay, that's our brightness cranked. It would be really nice if I could find the English option - hey there. It is English yay, fantastic. Okay, let's have a look at what options we have here: dynamic contrast ratio, so basically it'll dim on darker scenes and brighten up on brighter ones, Eco mode, brightness contrast and that's like, basically it depending on what we're using it for for a secondary display. Maybe that's all we need so there you go guys. Is it perfect? No, but it's functional, and my favorite part of this project is that while we may have taken the easy path, just making a desktop monitor out of a laptop panel here, there are so many possibilities for these cheap panels. You can use the same hardware that we're using here to build an index Spotify screen or a smart mirror heck. You could even build a screen into the side of your computer if you want, speaking of which make sure you're subscribed, because we've got a build planned in NZXT sexy case with the screen built into the side panel. It'S finally available, but that's a topic for another day. What isn't is this segue to our sponsor? I fix it. The I fix it pro tect toolkit is designed to help you tackle any electronics repair challenge. 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3. Not perfect, but functional