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why in the world would you ever want to build your own monitor i mean there are

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already a ton of good cheap monitors out there that would be

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as good or better than something that you build yourself in fact we showed off

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a few of them recently well the answer lies not necessarily in using

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this puny little screen as your main display but rather in giving it a new

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lease on life as a secondary or even

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like tertiary display and the best part

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is if you're anything like me and you hoard a bunch of old technology you may

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already have a panel that's just waiting to be reclaimed from an old laptop or

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tablet so today we're going to show you just how easy it is to make your own

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monitor from just a couple of cheap parts and a little bit of creativity

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speaking of creativity how creative is this segue to our sponsor bridge wallet

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so first up here is the star of the show the panel so ours here is probably

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something you've seen before it's a super common 15.6 inch ips panel with a

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resolution of 1920 by 1080. next up is

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something you probably haven't seen before this right here is an embedded

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displayport controller which is roughly analogous to the scalar module that you

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would find in a typical desktop monitor so this here converts the hdmi signal

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that's coming out of your graphics card into a signal that the panel here

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can understand so we purchased both our lcd and our edp

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adapter from ebay but guys before you go out and like buy a screen take a look on

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craigslist or at local electronics recyclers like freegeek and see if you

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can find something that doesn't need to be shipped you might be able to score a

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deal and get some of that bonus karma for keeping a perfectly good screen from

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going to waste wherever you get your panel once you've got it the first thing

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you're going to want to do is establish what specific connector it uses so the

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most common connector that you're going to find on 1080p panels like this one is

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a 30 pin edp connector like the one i'm

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holding here now if you do decide to harvest your lcd from a laptop or

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otherwise make sure to verify that the connector on the back matches with the

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display adapter that you choose another word of warning if you plan on using an

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old ipad or a macbook do a little extra

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research and make sure that you can even find an adapter for it apple has this

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tendency to use proprietary connectors for their displays

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i know i'm shocked

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moving on now then to the brains of the operation our display adapter now in

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addition to acting as a signal converter here i think hdmi goes in there this

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provides our on-screen display which hopefully will allow us to adjust things

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like screen brightness contrast and all

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that kind of good stuff it's really easy to gloss over how

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important this little driver is and even harder to believe that it only costs 20

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bucks now that we've got all the components of our display figured out

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here the next thing we need to do is be responsible and boot it up and make sure

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it works before we assemble the whole thing then we're going to put it in that

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frame over there and try and use it as an actual monitor the golden end goes

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into the bottom of the monitor just like that just be careful when you're putting

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these in these are quite fragile connectors they're not intended you know

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like a like a usb plug to be unplugged and plugged back in and all that stuff

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and then on the other side we've got a little flip up plastic piece

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here and then our contacts go down

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so that they touch the pins on the inside of the connector we slide it in

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and then lock it down like that oops we do it a lot more evenly than that

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that's better we found this 12 volt 3 amp power adapter in a bin now

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all i need is my laptop all right let's see

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hey well that was painless

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look at that i wonder if rosd works

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uh menu and it's in korean

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so with that out of the way all we need now is this little baggie of 256 and 440

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screws and nuts this little knife here for cleaning up

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our 3d prints this screwdriver for screwing everything together and

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in the interest of completeness this power drill that we actually only

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use just to uh the clearances were a little tight on the holes for the

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on-screen display so we loosened them a little bit and now it's fine but i won't

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actually use that on camera so for all the details on these parts guys you can

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check out the forum link in the description where we have all of the

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components the 3d models the fasteners and where you can find them if you

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wanted to do something like this for yourself now the real bulk of this

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project was actually getting all these parts printed the design that we used is

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from fox underscore exe on thingiverse so we got to give huge kudos to him for

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a pretty well thought out design especially how the back panels interlock

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with the edp adapter case with that being said the design is clearly marked

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as being a work in progress so we did find some areas that needed improvements

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and we've uploaded the remix of his design for you guys to enjoy

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so you'll need to print 17 parts in total so be prepared to spend some time

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cleaning up 3d prints for this project as between the successful ones

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and the less successful ones there are probably going to be quite a

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few of them so with all that out of the way we're ready to build so step number one for us

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is going to be assembling the base now this was one piece that we did have

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to reassemble and honestly our solution it's not perfect but it's

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functional enough so you go ahead and you

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pop the top of the stand in here just

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there we go and then this loop right here kind of hooks onto it and holds it in place if

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you want it to hold more securely what you could do is put a big washer on here

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and then screw it in from this side

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and thread that through the 3d printed hole in the back it'll just kind of

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self-tap in there and that would hold it better but honestly our monitor is not

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heavy enough that we consider that to be an issue so we're just going to go ahead

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and pop that on there boom stand just like

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that next we're going to lay down our display panel and we're gonna arrange

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these four pieces like so you can tell

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the top pieces from the bottom pieces from the extra little nubbins that they

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have for the components at the bottom of the panel we pre-installed the bottom

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bezel here just because it's a little bit of a pain in the butt

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but with some elbow grease you'll get it on there

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i'm just going to go ahead and pop that on

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there we go now is a good time to reinstall the ribbon cable from the

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monitor so i'm going to go ahead and pop that on there then we're going to route it up

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here because that's where we're ultimately going to need it for bonus points you can do a little bit of cable

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management here have it come out about like so that's going to make it the

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finished install a little bit tidier now that we're at this stage we can go

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ahead and insert our buttons in the rest of the front bezel

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so we just go ahead and pop this puppy on

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there you go look at that do they work

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hey nice all right so we're gonna throw this on

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here there we go and then

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this piece is a little bit finicky guys

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but uh yeah all right let's make sure that our

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buttons are all still exposed

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all right so we're using our shorter screws here and these will help hold

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together our bottom bezel okay

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so now we put the rest of our backing back in place and we can go ahead and connect our edp

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adapter there we go

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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

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we uh position our port saw on the

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corresponding holes you can see that actually lines up quite nicely though

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and then our ribbon cable through this gap here

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in the housing now that these are installed we're gonna go ahead and flip

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it around like this you can see there's a little notch here

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where the cables come out one thing that'll help you get this lined up is it's going to be hard to see

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in the camera but there's little guides

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to kind of lock all these pieces in place there we go

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so theoretically once they're all in there

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it's not going to move around too much and it should screw right in then we get

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these parts which are going to attach to our stand

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and we put them on right here and it's finally time to screw the thing together

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with hopefully all those holes aligned and we're going to use our long screws

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this time around so now we can pick it up you can see it's a little floppy there

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that's why there's these clips so these go on

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a little something like that boop

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and there it is boop

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and that for better or for worse

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is a monitor now a perfect monitor

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no don't be stupid but

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it's a monitor now we're going to take one of our 440

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screws and we're going to put it through here with a nut on the other side we

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need quite a bit of clamping force which is why we're going to use a nut rather

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than just relying on threading into the 3d filament i'm going to tighten this up

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because this is what's going to keep our monitor from tilting

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when we don't want it to see how that holds on there

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yeah now the other side

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there we go oh not bad pretty tight all right oh

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there we go ladies and gentlemen it's a monitor

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it's alive actually i don't know if it's a live yet okay so let's plug our power

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adapter in hdmi goes in

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hey well that's great that makes sense that's cool uh these are designed to

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have the back of a laptop on them so you can actually see the backlight fire up

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here see that check it out

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give it a sec there it is

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it's lit boom secondary monitor just like that uh

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note guys the original plan did kind of call for side bezels but they were

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either incomplete or we couldn't find them or some combination of the two and

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all it would really serve to do is put a bigger bezel on it so we just didn't

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really worry about it we do have a bit of a problem though our brightness le

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sucks so fortunately um

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oh speaking of things that le suck um our

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menu ain't great oop sorry that button's jammed

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up

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okay we never said it was perfect there we go okay that's our brightness

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cranked it would be really nice if i could find

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the english option hey there it is

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english yay fantastic

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okay let's have a look at what options we have here dynamic contrast ratio so

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basically it'll dim on darker scenes and brighten up on brighter ones

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uh eco mode brightness contrast and that's

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like basically it depending on what we're

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using it for for a secondary display maybe that's all we need

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so there you go guys is it perfect

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no but it's functional and my favorite part of

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this project is that while we may have taken the easy path just making a

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desktop monitor out of a laptop panel here there are so many possibilities for

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these cheap panels you can use the same hardware that we're using here to build

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an in-desk spotify screen or a smart

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mirror or heck you could even build a screen into the side of your computer if

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you want speaking of which make sure you're subscribed because we've got a

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build planned in nzxt's sexy case with the screen built into the side panel

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it's finally available but that's a topic for another day what isn't is this

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forward slash linus and pick up your protec toolkit today so thanks for

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watching guys hope you enjoyed and we will see you at our next video

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yeah not perfect

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but functional