I've taken an lcd screen out of a third party mp4 player and i'm trying to make it into a video module. It has a 50 pin motherboard connector and i was wondering if anybody had any ideas how i would do this?

Better hope the pinout and software interface specs are available from the manufacturer, otherwise you'll have a lot of work on your hands reverse engineering it. What are you connecting it to, what's a video module?

I looked into doing the same with an old laptop screen for a friend's final architecture project. We gave up.

Short answer: it'll cost you around $500.00 for the hardware to drive it. [EDIT: assuming you want a pre-built solution; obviously cheaper if you build your own control board, just much harder]

Longer answer: As far as I learned, LCD inputs are not even remotely standardized. Generally they require custom hardware to drive the display. (That's one primary reason that you don't see many laptop graphics cards getting regular driver updates). As such there's no standard hardware/driver that will allow you to convert a standard VGA/DVI output into an LCD input. I was originally thinking, cool i'll just get a converter cable and be done with it; nope, you need a whole control board.

I've lost the link to the company that offered the PCI card to drive LCD panels...I might have posted on this site, search around.

-me

It's from an mp4 player and it has video in. Is it possible the pin outs could be the same as another commercially sold and/or better documented lcd screen...and by the way, a video module is a small screen attached to something (usually a pc) to show you data uch as temperatures or msn messages so you can continue your work.

And i have the lcd's part number but i need help on dealing with the 50 pin connector. What do i do to hook that up to an easier medium, preferably a/v?

Quote:Original post by AWeaver
And i have the lcd's part number but i need help on dealing with the 50 pin connector. What do i do to hook that up to an easier medium, preferably a/v?

That's what the circuit board I was talking about is for. You need control logic to convert the signal from "a/v" into the LCD input. This will require either:

a) a pre-made circuit board (when I priced them they were around $400-$500)
b) a board of your own making (this obviously requires hardware skills & documentation of that model's pinout format but should be much cheaper)

That pinout format is not commonly made public so you may have to try to reverse engineer it. That could be dangerous to the functionality of the LCD if you get the voltages wrong.

As I said, doing this is much more difficult than you would expect in our ease-of-use consumer electronic society. this is why I abandoned my similar project. To me it just wasn't worth the time or money.

The alternative avenue is to just buy an LCD and control board from somewhere. There are plenty of vendors that will sell you the raw parts in easy-to-use format. In the end it'll probably be cheaper than trying to get your scavenged LCD to work.

[EDIT: what's your level of hardware technical competence? It'll make answering you easier]

-me

Alright thanks, any websites you recommend that sell the lcd and boards?