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
tablet so today we're going to 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
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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 scalar 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 freegeek 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 going to want to do is establish what specific connector it uses so the
most common connector that you're going to 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 i think hdmi goes 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 costs 20
bucks now that we've got all the components of our display figured out
here the 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 going to 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 in these are quite fragile connectors they're not intended you know
like a like a usb plug to be unplugged and plugged 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 oops we do it a lot more evenly than that
that's better we found this 12 volt 3 amp power adapter in a bin now
all i need is my laptop all right let's see
hey well that was painless
look at that i wonder if rosd works
uh 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 uh the clearances were a little tight on the holes for the
on-screen display so we loosened 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 forum 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 that 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 there are probably going to 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 going to 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
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 more securely what you could do is put a big washer 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 monitor is not
heavy enough that we consider that to be an issue so we're just going to go ahead
and pop that on there boom stand just like
that next we're going to 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 going to go ahead and pop that on
there we go now is a good time to reinstall the ribbon cable from the
monitor so i'm going to go ahead and pop that on there then we're going to route it up
here because that's where we're ultimately going to need it for bonus points you can do a little bit of cable
management here have it come out about like so that's going to 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 all right so we're gonna throw this on
here there we go and then
this piece is a little bit finicky guys
but uh yeah all right let's make sure that our
buttons are all still exposed
all right so we're using our shorter screws here and these will help hold
together our bottom bezel okay
so now we put the rest of our backing back in place and we can go ahead and connect our edp
adapter there we go
i'm sure you guys expect nothing less but i'm going to mention it anyway once again it's a little bit finicky here as
we uh position our port saw on the
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'll help you get this lined up is it's going to 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 going to move around too much and it should screw right in then we get
these parts which are going to 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 going to 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 going to take one of our 440
screws and we're going to put it through here with a nut on the other side we
need quite a bit of clamping force which is why we're going to use a nut rather
than just relying on threading into the 3d filament i'm going to tighten this up
because this is what's going to keep our monitor from tilting
when we don't want it to see how that holds on there
yeah now the other side
there we go oh not bad pretty tight all right oh
there we go ladies and gentlemen it's a monitor
it's alive actually i don't know if it's a live yet okay so let's plug our power
adapter in hdmi goes in
hey well that's great that makes sense that's cool uh these are designed to
have the back of a laptop on them so you can actually see the backlight fire up
here see that check it out
give it a sec there it is
it's lit boom secondary monitor just like that uh
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 it so we just didn't
really worry about it we do have a bit of a problem though our brightness le
sucks so fortunately um
oh speaking of things that le suck um our
menu ain't great oop sorry that button's 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
uh 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 in-desk spotify screen or a smart
mirror or 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's 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
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watching guys hope you enjoyed and we will see you at our next video
yeah not perfect
but functional