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It’s so sad when your trusty laptop hardware fails beyond repair – that pesky cat and the glass of fizzy drink…
The loss of data is usually ok nowadays because people have learned that backups and cloud computing has saved us from this most horrid of traumatic experience.
What can you do now?
Assuming you can manage to rip your old laptop apart of even if you have old hardware lying around – this is great news for this project!
Grab your screw drivers and have at tearing the screen out – carefully.
You’ll need to remove rubber screw covers, maybe pierce through the odd label or two to find those hidden screw heads.
Carefully remove the screen and set aside, you’ll be needing information from this screen before you move on.
What screen to use?
The screen itself should have a model number on the back of the panel. These are normally quite prominent and you’ll need to note that down.
Head to your favourite online shopping store (yeah ok, Amazon) and enter your model number with the phrase “controller board”.
This should return a good number of results and now you just need to make sure that you select the right board for your screen.
I searched for a “HDMI controller board” when I searched and found a lovely seller whom asked me to send them the model number to ensure I was getting the right controller board.
Don’t forget to make sure you check power requirements and order a power adapter (mine was 12v 3a) as you don’t normally get one with the board itself.
Bottom of screen is the HDMI controller.
Got a screen and controller board now?
The next obvious step is to hook it all together and make sure that it all works ok.
Check you can connect an input (I used my laptop’s HDMI output). You could even test out the sound of your controller has that too ?
It all works!
Great, now you need to house it all somehow so that it is useful.
I watched loads of YouTube videos on it but generally, as long as you can connect everything you want to into the ports you need (power, HDMI and sound), then you just need to make sure the screen is safely protected.
Mine ended up looking like this.
Back of screen (labelled parts)Various controller board parts.Front bezelI’m a wrapperOr TV, or Game Machine Screen – full 1080i ?
I have been doing some research into various technologies lately in an effort to bring some more fulfilling information or news of the next best thing.
I’ve been looking at electromagnetic coils and various other technology that might help me go off grid one day.
At the very least help me power my laptop longer 🙂
So I came across this site where they will show you how to recondition your old batteries and use them longer.
It’s a fantastic idea if you ask me as we all have somewhere we could light at night or have something we could be using a battery for instead of just throwing them away.
Whatever they’re asking, the knowledge alone must be worth it and I’m sure you’ll agree?
Now there are quite a few on the market, so to speak, but this one looks quite promising as they say they “take the technical” out.
So, I was trawling the net looking into different wordpress themes and I stumbled upon one that wants to provide a fully functional market interface from within wordpress.
Now there are quite a few on the market, so to speak, but this one looks quite promising as they say they “take the technical” out.
If you check it out and sign up, please let me know as I am keen to get your review published here 🙂
Reuse of “old tech” seems an alien concept to me, an guy from the late 70’s.
When I was a kid, the latest tech seemed like it would be here for years.
I remember sitting in front of my own TV in my bedroom! Granted it was huge and the set itself was the width of my single bed. It was magnificent though as it was a walnut veneer thing and was a solid wooden build.
I know this, because I fixed an audio jack to the thing so that I could watch TV at night without waking anyone else on the floor. It was only a mono speaker built in and a simple case of wiring in the audio jack -but that was decades ago.
So what about “New Old Tech”?
This is something close to my heart. I don’t like seeing the waste we create, the stories and images of our affect on our planet.
The generations before me were using paper for food wrapping and there were very little in the way of plastics being used, so to eat your chips with? – no… a wooden spork (Spoon-Fork).
Anyway, so I have worked in the IT industry long enough to know that when a laptop is classed “dead” by it’s user, the actual hardware components are not necessarily all useless. We’ve been doing this for decades with desktop machines and their parts. We harvest the good bits and use them again in other projects.
However laptops are slightly different. The hardware used in your general laptop (especially newer ones) will be very compact and even the inter connecting wires are either inbuilt paths on the actual boards themselves or, like with your laptop screen, you’ll often see a cable strip or small wires. It all depends on manufacturers or technology at the time the laptop was made.
So what about this hardware?
It depends on the situation and I look for specific things.
The Storage (HDD or SSD etc) isn’t much use unless you know the history of the machine you are getting. Also, unless the laptop is dead but the screen works, I don’t bother with company laptops.
I recently got one for myself from a company and even though I took out the old HDD for a new SSD, the system still believes it’s registered to that company, so be warned.
The screens are the best for reuse, in my humble opinion.
These are generally reusable as stand alone monitor / TVs and usually they can run at a lower power need than the laptop itself (remember laptops are battery use mad).
So the upshot is, that you can reuse the following:
Laptop motherboard
Laptop Screen
Laptop Webcam
So how?
Well the how is coming in another post but sign up for the newsletter and you’ll get notified.
It’s important to look after yourself, everyone would agree if asked.
It’s OK to be completely selfless and want to help everyone and in every little way.
Perhaps you travel each week just to see a friend whom you know wouldn’t have any visitor otherwise? or you put the bins out each week to save someone else doing it? – You’re amazing!
You deserve a pat on the back and warm drink and possibly a pay rise?
I can’t really help with the latter but I can tell you that there are things you can do to unwind or grab those precious moments to yourself.
Remember to just “be”. That’s probably my number 1 advice I’d give.
Don’t forget that it’s YOU that is doing all these things and therefore YOU should “take a beat” and relax too.
Its coming up to Halloween and I personally love this event and generally the lead up to it.
Since I was a small lad and was living at home with my family, I remember the excitement build at school as our lessons in art and design etc moved towards a more Halloween focus.
I remember being dragged round the shops with my mum throughout the year and the feeling I got when the displays took on a new look to sell the sweets and the other ghoulish delights.
So this has carried on and when I became a Dad, I got to start getting all those exciting feelings again but now its so much better!
I get to come up with some random things and the house gets a make over. We joke in our house that its bad luck to clear the spider webs in October. Makes the place look the part come the end of the month as we seem to house quite a few of the little tykes!.
So what’s this all got to do with Arduino and Pumpkins I hear you asking yourself? Well, I have many hobbies and this project has been combining quite a few of them.
So lets cover those hobbies off quickly:
3D Printing
3D Design
Linux
Arduino electronics
Bargain shopping
Solution development
So simply, you can see that these hobbies either can overlap very easily or remain separate.
Lets get to it.
The plan is to make a set of Pumpkins that are 3D printed and then wired up to an arduino to make certain LEDs (Light Emitting Diode(s)) to do my bidding.
Broken down into steps, they seem simple but I will detail out each step for your enjoyment.
Step 1. Find suitable pumpkin print from www.thingiverse.com
Step 2. Print 3D pumkpins
Step 3. Source low cost LEDs (Basically Shopping)
Step 4. Source Arduino and needed wires
Step 5. Connect electronics up
Step 6. Program Arduino
Step 7. Make presentable
Step 1 was easy enough and was actually the originating “light bulb” moment. You can take a look here. Basically, the pumpkin is hollow and has a face on the inside of the print. This means that when lit from the outside it is smooth but then when you light the inside, the face is visible.
This made me think to automate this light on, light off.
Step 2 was not so simple. My 3D printer (lovingly called “oh bum”) decided to play all sorts of tricks which took some time to navigate. I ended up using quite a lot of orange filament but the results will be fine. If you are going to follow these steps and reproduce your own, I would recommend looking closely at the skin thickness you print with and the infill settings as this print was such a large overhang. That said though, there is a reason my printer is called that and inlays another story completely.
Step 3 was super simple. I was performing my regular wander around the local shops and happened upon a reel of LEDs connected to a USB connector. For a £5. These had 30 LEDs on the strip, self adhesive backing paper and obviously run on USB power (5v).
Interestingly though the LED strip has built in resistors that mean that each LED can be cut off the strip and with some new wiring, can be connected and powered by any 5v source. I expect they would run on less voltage too.
Step 4 was case of going online and finding an Arduino and some jumper wires. This was really easy and Amazon sorted it out within a day or so.
Step 5 wasn’t as hard as it was fiddly. The LEDs themselves are only fixed to a thin strip of sticky tape. The tape is copper and sliced to allow the positive and negative sides to remain separate but span the length of the tape. So power goes in one end of the tape and powers all the subsequent LEDs from there.
So removing one LED (cutting it off the end of the tape) leaves me with little to solder new wires onto. Further more, the LEDs then are not held particularly well and the wires threaten disconnecting etc.
To solve this, I used some insulation tape to hold things tightly and this will allow me to position the completed, soldered and covered LEDs into where I need them.
Some notes on wires, these should be a good length and thought needs to be put into where the display will be seen.
Once the wires to the LEDs were sorted, it was time to begin the thinking on how to connect them to the Arduino. This was simply a case of understanding that the Arduino puts out a voltage to the pins you program it to. So plugging the LEDs in was as simple as connecting the negative wires to the ground on the arduino and the positive wires to the arduino I/O pins.
Step 6 In conjunction with www.arduino.cc and various examples, it was easy to find an example code that was turning an LED on and off already made for me. This was in the Arduino software from install and following their instructions (something I have done many times before) I was able to code up a program to power one LED for 10 seconds and then switch off and then turn a couple of other LEDs on for a few seconds, then off, then on for a few seconds before repeating.
This was easier than it sounds and playing around with the timings was half the fun of this project.
Once the code was uploaded to the Arduino and, when powered up, the project did exactly as I programmed it to.
Making the first LED that comes on further away from my pumpkins (longer power wire), it means that the scene gets lit before it goes dark and the pumpkin faces display as the second LEDs power up.
Step 7 is a case of placing the completed project in your desired environment, powering up and watching the show as the project comes to life.
