reuse old tech – Linked 2 U

Laptop died.

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.

Or TV, or Game Machine Screen – full 1080i ?

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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.

Tag: reuse old tech

Make a Laptop TV!