All Upgraded or Repaired

-

Putting all of it together, here is my recently upgraded HP Pavilion G6 laptop connected to the 39-inch ISIS television (see post here), both of which were given to me as broken items by kind people of Freegle. I bodged a backlight repair for the TV for nothing using scrap LEDs, which lasted over a year and when that failed I took a punt and bought a new set of backlight LED strips on eBay for about £15 rather than dump a good large-screen television. It is now working so well, I spent £4 on eBay and bought a remote for it as the original one was missing.



Fortnightly 'Virtual Pub' in lock-down with my friends from all over the world, we even had an old mate join us from Singapore even though it was 3 am there! The camera is my dashcam in USB camera mode (I haven't been driving much as I'm working 12-hour days from home instead). The laptop can cope with the big screen only in this set-up otherwise the GPU tends to overheat.



Oh, I needed a lamp as the workshop was a bit dark for a Zoom call, so I quickly threw together this spot-lamp, again all from old bits-and-pieces I have picked up over the years. The lamp itself was a sample that was in a flight case a guy gave me and as I didn't have the track system for it, I just wired a 13-amp cable into it. LED bulb was about £4 on AliExpress.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Update on the touch monitor

-
This is tantalising... I found some data on driver chips used on these low-cost monitors and some of them have an I2C connection for sending pixel data directly to the screen. This may be to allow text or graphics overlay. Anyway the chip on my 7" screens is an AR05C-LF and there are millions of these in stock in the far east, but I can't so far find a data sheet for this chip or its sibling the AR05CA-LF. Being able to send digital pixel data via I2C directly to the screen would be, well, brilliant.
Read more

Apple iPad SSH Connection to Linux Laptop

-
Image
I was given this older Apple iPad a while back and was looking into installing Linux on it. Options are limited, but it is possible to install a shell to the iPad and run command line stuff.  SSH is always a bit of fun so I logged into my Linux Mint laptop remotely for a giggle. It was interesting running a few simple commands from the iPad. My cheapo Bluetooth keyboard came in very useful although I discovered that the iPad's OS version predated mouse support so the trackpad didn't work. Going a step further, I got my Raspberry Pi going again and was able to install VNC on the iPad and remotely control the Raspberry Pi's desktop. Could be useful! I'm also looking at fitting a small heatsink and 5-volt fan (recovered from a broken laptop) to the Raspberry Pi and over clocking it to 1GHz.
Read more

Six Inches - Big Enough

-
Image
I got around to taking the screen out of one of the LCD units to see what could be done with it. For a start the actual screen is 6.2" (according to the serial number and a ruler) not 7" as on the manufacturer's website, but that's no bad thing. It turns out a 6.2" screen is just the right size to fit in a double-DIN car radio slot, which prompts all sorts of ideas. It also turned out that there were 2 circuit boards, a big one with an audio amplifier and some power supply circuitry and a small one for the actual screen. Essentially the screen will operate with just a 4-wire connection (9 volt, GND, Video and Video GND). There is another connector for options (screen mode, colour and brightness), but with nothing connected to this the monitor defaults to perfectly use-able settings. In the photo I have it hooked to a PC via a VGA-to-Video adaptor. The computer is running Tiny Core Linux (my new favourite distro) in 640 x 480 mode (I think). It will go down to 320
Read more