Upcycling Old Laptop Displays

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A couple of years ago I acquired one of these, a Zoostorm Fizzbook Spin, a swivel screen netbook which had been aimed at the school sector and in particular at pupils with special and additional needs. It came out just before the first tablet computers hit the market and was made obsolete pretty quickly. It was an interesting piece of kit and I upgraded the RAM and hard drive and put Linux Mint on it (of course).


Anyhow, I needed a clear out and the Fizzbook wasn't being used for much, but the display intrigued me because it had an integrated resistive touchscreen so I decided to try something out. I dismantled the computer and carefully recovered the display, which turned out to be a HannStar HSD101PFW2 (10.1 inch) with LED backlighting.


A quick trip into eBay and I was able to find a controller board for this display complete with remote control for £20 postage paid from the Shenzhen SEZ.


The controller board arrived in about 10 days and simply plugs into the display panel. All that's needed after that is a 12-volt supply at 2 amps or more and away it went. The inputs include HDMI, VGA, composite video and digital TV, and as a bonus it can display video files from a USB drive.


The next thing is to test out the touch panel (see the little 4-way connector on the left in the photo above) using a USB-touch interface I've had lying around for a few years from previous experiments. I would quite like to case this is something simple made from clear perspex.

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