Thanks to a friend’s generous donation of a nonfunctional Dell Inspiron E1505, I have another LCD panel to play with. (And distract me from FreeNAS Box project.) The eventual ambition is to upgrade my Luggable PC to a multiple-monitor system but as a first step, I’ll learn to work with the new panel by turning it into a portable external monitor. If phase 1 is successful, it becomes an optional additional accessory I can lug alongside the Luggable PC. Then, if I’m feeling ambitions, I can move on to phase 2 of integrating everything into a multi-monitor Luggable PC.

The first order of business is to extract the panel and look at its specifications. Dell laptops around that vintage offer resolution as low as 1024×768, which wouldn’t even be worth the effort to resurrect. Fortunately, this LG Philips LP154W02 panel has a decently respectable 1680×1050 resolution.

Since the computer doesn’t work, next I have to see if the panel does. Off to Amazon to look for boards that claim to drive this panel. The first board (*) pictured here was able to present all the right info to a computer, and it can power the back light, but no picture showed on screen. At this time I was worried – did I get a bum board, or is the display dead?

After some diagnostic chatter with the seller, I was pointed to another board they carried. The first board was computer-focused, the second board was more TV and media focused. The upside is that it worked. The downside is that it seems to have trouble preserving 1:1 pixel information at 1680×1050. I wonder if its media-focused nature meant it up scale all signals to 1080p and then down sample to the panel resolution. That would explain the minor visual artifacts.

The artifacts does take a bit away from the success. But it’s lit, it shows a picture, and that’s good enough to proceed.

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(*) Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.