It was fun to look at a revived LED backlight module, salvaged from a LG laptop display panel model LP133WF2(SP)(A1). It was controlled from a breadboard Arduino, and powered by my bench power supply. I’m still unsure what input voltage it was originally designed for, but it seemed to run well at 5V. When I turned brightness up to maximum, the bench power supply reported 1A of current draw. As a 5W LED light, it does feel approximately in the same ballpark as the 7W LED bulbs serving as 60W incandescent bulb replacements. But with the key and very valuable difference of the fact its light is evenly distributed across a much large area for a softer more diffuse light.

While I’m at it, I measured the electrical behavior of these LED strings. This is mostly for reference since the TPS61187 chip handles adjusting these voltage values to keep electricity flowing at the target current. When it sees a very minimal PWM signal, I measure the voltage drop from anode to ground to be roughly 15V and the panel is not visibly illuminated at this low level. When I turn the duty cycle up high enough to see just a little bit of visible illumination, the voltage differential has climbed to 24V. At max power, I measured about 28V. This was all generated by the onboard boost converter from a 5V input signal. In my experience white LEDs drop roughly 2.7-3V at full power, so these values are consistent with parallel LED strings of either nine or ten LEDs per string.,

Since this circuit seemed to run at 5V, I thought it would be fun to convert this to run on USB. The Arduino Nano was designed to run on 5V and already had a handy USB jack, and most portable USB power banks can supply 5V@1A or at least they claim to. When I hooked up the wires, it was able to illuminate up to a certain level. But beyond that level (roughly 1/4 to 1/3 brightness) the lights started flickering in a classic sign of power instability. Oops. What went wrong?

Whenever I see potential sign of power instability, my first reaction is always to perform the Big Honkin’ Capacitor test. Find the biggest capacitor I have handy, connect it across the power input terminals, and see if that solves the problem. In this case, the big capacitor failed to soothe the system.

Digging into schematics for an official Arduino Nano, I see that the VUSB line is not directly connected to the +5V output pin. There are a few components in the way, relating to power control and regulation. The Arduino Nano could be powered via its VIN pin. Following Arduino Uno barrel jack precedence, the input voltage is usually recommended to be 9V. When this happens, there’s a diode presumably to make sure that 9V does not feed back into the USB +V line. There are also several capacitors in parallel with VUSB but they should help rather than interfere with any instability.

Mystified as to why I couldn’t power the backlight via this Arduino Nano’s USB jack, I wanted to isolate the problem. See if the problem lies within the Arduino Nano or with my USB power bank. I took a USB cable and cut off its a damaged micro-B connector. Splaying out the wires, I found VUSB and GND wires, and I connected that to the Arduino Nano circuit. With this arrangement, my backlight module is happy all the way up to full brightness with no flickering problem.

Something about this particular (non-genuine) Arduino Nano module is causing interference, and I don’t understand why, but at least I have a workaround. That’s enough for me to ignore this weirdness today and proceed with my backlight project, even if there was a temporary setback.

I’ve successfully interfaced with the existing TPS61187 driver chip on the circuit board of a LG laptop display panel LP133WF2(SP)(A1), and brought the backlight module back to life. Given all the new territory I had to explore to get this far, I was very excited by a successful initial test. After I was able to calm down, I settled down to take a closer look at its physical/optical behavior.

Since I tested it face-down, the easiest thing to look at first are the backsides of the LED strip. Most of it is hidden by the sheet metal frame from this side, but from earlier examination I knew there was even less to see from the front. Once illuminated, we can see the structure inside the light strip. The yellow flexible segment that connects to the green circuit board isn’t a separate piece like I thought earlier, it is actually all a single sheet of flexible circuit. All the LEDs are mounted on it, and they are located at the very bottom edges of the screen. I knew the lights themselves had to be very thin and well hidden right up against the bottom edge, but I couldn’t figure out where the wiring would go. Now we can see all electrical wiring runs above the LEDs, and when we look at it from the front we can see it as a thin strip of light gray along the bottom.

I had been worried that the illumination would be compromised because it is working without some of the friends it had earlier. The backside used to have a laptop lid that would have helped reflect and diffuse light. And the front used to be up against the LCD pixel array, which was backed by a mirror finish that would have also helped reflect light around.

I need not have worried. It was quite evenly illuminated and, as seen in the wire shadow picture above, there are no distinct spotlights marking location of individual LEDs.

I also wondered if the surprisingly complex four-layer diffuser required precise alignment with the LEDs in order to do their light distribution magic. They are no longer pressed by the LCD pixel array into a tight space, but happily they still worked quite well. While they worked visibly best at certain positions, the falloff is graceful. Not like aiming a laser at precision optics. Now I’m even more impressed by this stuff performing magic with light in ways I don’t understand.

But one thing I do understand is that they look thin and quite fragile. Designed to sit behind a LCD panel of multiple glass layers and without that, these layers of magical optical sheets flap around. I looked around and found a piece of 3mm clear acrylic that is nearly the perfect size and taped it to the metal backing chassis. The acrylic is far thicker than the LCD glass sandwich used to be, but it is also more rigid, so that’s a good tradeoff.

The final comparison I wanted to make before moving on is: how bright is the backlight alone compared to the full backlight plus LCD screen? I placed this backlight, turned brightness all the way up high, and set it side-by-side with the intact replacement screen still serving display duty in the Chromebook. I then turned on the Chromebook and increased its screen brightness to maximum setting.

I don’t have light level measurement instruments to obtain an objective number, but this picture makes it quite clear there is a dramatic difference in brightness. I knew some light would have been lost within the layers of a LCD panel, but it’s fun to see firsthand it’s far more than I had expected. This really drove home why alternate display technologies with self-illuminating pixels (OLED, micro-LED, etc.) can offer much brighter pictures than a backlit LCD could. My salvaged backlight is plenty bright running on just 5V, but running it on USB took more effort than expected.

Trying to revive the LED backlight from a LG Lp133WF2(SP)(A1) laptop display panel, I am focused on a TPS61187 LED driver chip on its integrated circuit board. After studying its datasheet, I soldered a few wires to key parts of the circuit and applied power, checking the circuit as I went. Nothing has gone obviously wrong yet, so the final step is to give that driver chip a PWM signal to dictate brightness.

This is where I am happy I’ve added Arduino to my toolbox, because I was able to whip up a controllable PWM signal generator in minutes. Putting an Arduino Nano onto a breadboard, I wired up a potentiometer to act as interactive input. 5V power and ground were shared with the panel, and one of the PWM-capable output pins was connected to the TPS61187 PWM input line via a 10 kΩ resistor as per datasheet. I found that my enable line already had a 1 kΩ resistor on board, so now I wired enable directly to the 5V line.

Since I wanted some confidence in my circuit before plugging the panel into the circuit, I also wired a test LED in parallel with the PWM signal line. I had originally thought I could use the LED already on board the Arduino, but that is hard-wired to pin 13 which is not one of the PWM-capable pins, so the external LED was necessary for me to run my PWM-generating test code, which thanks to the Arduino framework was as easy as:

int sensorPin = A0;    // select the input pin for the potentiometer
int ledPin = 3;        // select the pin for the LED
int sensorValue = 0;   // variable to store the value coming from the sensor

void setup() {
  // declare the ledPin as an OUTPUT:
  pinMode(ledPin, OUTPUT);
}

void loop() {
  // read potentiometer position
  sensorValue = analogRead(sensorPin);

  // map analogRead() range to analogWrite() range
  sensorValue = map(sensorValue, 0, 1023, 0, 255);

  analogWrite(ledPin, sensorValue);
}

My external test LED brightened and dimmed in response to potentiometer knob turns, so that looked good. My heart started racing as I connected the panel to my Arduino breadboard, which is then connected to my benchtop power supply. Even though I’m powering this system with 5V, I used a bench power supply instead of a USB port. Because I didn’t know how much the panel drew and didn’t want to risk damaging my computer. Also, by using a benchtop power supply I could monitor the current draw and also set a limit of 120mA (20mA spread across 6 strings) for the first test.

I powered up the system with the potentiometer set to minimum, then slowly started turning the knob clockwise…

It lit up! It lit up! Woohoo!

I was very excited at this success, jumping and running down the hallway. It was a wild few minutes before I could settle down and calmly take a closer look.

I want to reuse the TPS61187 LED Driver IC already on board the display circuit board of a LG LP133WF2(SP)(A1) laptop LCD panel. Driving the backlight that used to shine from behind the now-cracked LCD screen. After studying the datasheet and probed around the circuit board to understand how the chip is configured, I am now probing to see where I can solder wires to interface with the chip.

There are two major concerns here. The first is that I’m learning to work with modern consumer electronics, with circuit boards populated by very small surface mount components. Most of the resistors and capacitors I probed earlier are barely larger than the tip of my soldering iron’s finest tip. The “normal” tip is comically large next to these things. If I continue with experiments like this I will need to buy my own hot air station and learn to use it well.

The second concern are the other components on this control board. If I supply voltage and ground to the TPS61187, the rest of the circuit will probably come alive in some way I don’t understand. I’m not worried about them draining a bit of battery, that’s the best case scenario. I’m more worried about them interfering with the backlight control signals for enable (EN) and brightness (PWM).

First target is to find a place to inject power. The datasheet told me where the power pins are on this chip, but it’s far too small for me to hand solder myself. I’m not saying it’s impossible to hand solder to them, I’m just saying it’s very difficult and unlikely to succeed with my current skill level. So I went poking around nearby components looking for a decoupling capacitor. Because this driver IC uses a boost converter circuit to raise the voltage to drive the backlight LEDs, I expect to find a sizable decoupling capacitor nearby to isolate the rest of this board from the electrical noise of boost conversion. I found one adjacent to the inductor. For a surface-mounted component, it is large and thankfully big enough for me to feel confident I could solder to its two ends for VIN and GND.

I found a resistor and capacitor nearby connected to the enable pin. But even though they are larger than the corresponding TPS61187 pin I couldn’t solder to them. I was able to connect to one side of the small capacitor, but an intended-to-be-gentle test tug ripped off the wire taking a corner chunk of the capacitor with it. Oops, not so gentle after all.

I had even less luck finding a PWM signal connection near the TPS61187. I could see its pin connection on the circuit board, but it instantly sank out of sight to one of the other layers of the board and I found no place nearby where it surfaced.

After some thought, I decided to look for these signals near the largest chip sitting on the other end of the board, labelled “LG Display ANX2804”. I reasoned that EN and PWM are probably controlled from this chip and perhaps I could find something. There was nothing obvious near the chip itself, but I struck gold on the backside of the board. Sitting effectively under the ANX2804 are several labelled and accessible test points, and I was happy to see “LED_EN” next to one pad and “PWM” next to another. (There’s also VLED visible further left I didn’t notice until later, which should be better than soldering to the VIN end of a surface mount decoupling capacitor.)

Continuity test confirmed these do connect all the way across this thin strip of circuit board to the TPS61187, I think we are in business! Time to do some soldering.

I’ve read through the datasheet for a TI TPS61187 LED driver chip and I think I have a fair (if not perfect) grasp of how to use it. Specifically I want to use one I found on the integrated driver board of a LG laptop LCD panel I’ve taken apart, there to drive the backlight module I wanted to salvage as a LED light. Armed with the datasheet and a multimeter, I started poking at the driver board to understand how it uses the chip. Since most of the chip’s configuration are done via resistors connected to certain pins, I could use the ohmmeter to decipher configuration. I enlarged and printed out my picture of that area of the circuit board so I could scribble down notes as I went.

Here’s what I found on this board, listed in order of their corresponding datasheet sections:

7.3.1 Supply Voltage

For applications that are always-on, it is valid for the enable (EN) pin to be connected to the chip’s internal regulator output pin VDDIO. Since a laptop would want to put a screen to sleep, I did not expect EN to be tied to VDDIO and my meter confirmed it was not. Which means I’ll have to go hunting for my own connection to EN later.

7.3.2 Boost Regulator and Programmable Switch Frequency (FSCLT)

The internal boost converter can operate at a range of frequencies, giving the designer an option to tradeoff between efficiency, inductor component size, etc. I probed the selection resistor on this board to be 822 kΩ. Plugging this into datasheet formula I arrive at a switching frequency of 608 kHz. Table 1 lists a few recommended values, and 833 kΩ is one of the recommendations for 600 kHz. I suspect this was indeed the intent and this 822 kΩ resistor is pretty good at less than 2% off nominal value.

7.3.3 LED Current Sinks

This is arguably the core parameter of driving LEDs. I traced the circuit and found two resistors in series. ~20 kΩ and ~31 kΩ but they added up to about 58 kΩ so there’s obviously something else I missed. Nevertheless, plugging 58 kΩ into datasheet formula says it’ll sets the target at 20mA. Typical for driving LEDs.

7.4.2 Adjustable PWM Dimming Frequency and Mode Selection (R_FPWM/MODE)

There are two ways to control brightness of the backlight. Either they can be blinked directly by an external PWM signal, or they can be blinked with an internal signal generator. One advantage of using the internal signal is that the phase for each of six strings are offset, so they blink in turn instead of simultaneously, which I expect to give smoother dimming. Another advantage of separating the two signals is that the external PWM can run at a far slower frequency, even one that would otherwise cause visible flicker, but it wouldn’t matter. Because once its duty cycle is read, it is copied for use by the internal generator running at a far faster flicker-free rate.

Probing the configuration resistors proved this board uses the internal high speed PWM signal. The resistor is 3.9 kΩ which works out to about 46.6 kHz. This is not one of the Table 2 recommendations, in fact it is over twice the speed of the highest recommended value. at 9.09 kΩ / 20 kHz. Higher switching frequency usually mean smoother behavior but lower power efficiency, I wonder what design meeting decisions at LG led to this value. Though of course it’s possible I’ve misread the value somehow.

7.4.4 Overvoltage Clamp and Voltage Feedback (OVC/FB)

These resistors configure how the boost converter works, and there’s an ideal formula in the datasheet mapping input voltage to LED output voltage. I was able to measure R_down as 20 kΩ, but R_upper did not converge. My ohmmeter’s initial reading was in the 370-400 kΩ range, but the value continued to increase as I kept the probes in place. Eventually it would read as off-scale high. I think this means there’s a capacitor in parallel?

Out of all the configurations I had hoped to read, this was the one I really wanted to get because it would inform me as to the best voltage level to feed into this system. With this ambiguous reading, I’m sadly no wiser.

But at least I have some idea of how this chip has been configured to run, so I could continue probing this circuit board looking for places where I can interface with this LED driving circuit.

I wanted to see if I could power up just the LED backlight portion of a broken LG LCD laptop screen, model LP133WF2(SP)(A1). It was cracked and couldn’t display images, but the backlight still worked before I took it apart. Does it still work? I wanted to find out and I still had the screen’s integrated driver circuit board and will try that first. The biggest question mark here is how the rest of the circuit board will react if I try to power up the TI TPS61187 LED driver chip in-place on the circuit board. My fallback position is to bypass the chip and power the LED strings directly, but that wouldn’t be as energy-efficient and I lose out on cool features. The one most novel to me is the phase-shifted PWM dimming control, where the six LED strings are dimmed round-robin instead of all at once for a smoother display. It’s not something I would likely do if I had to power the LEDs directly with my own cricuit.

To see if I could get the original circuit running, I plan to do it in steps based on this excerpt from the datasheet:

7.3.4 Enable and Start-up

The internal regulator which provides VDDIO wakes up as soon as VIN is applied even when EN is low. This allows the device to start when EN is tied to the VDDIO pin. VDDIO does not come to full regulation until EN is high. The TPS61187 checks the status of all current feedback channels and shuts down any unused feedback channels. It is recommended to short the unused channels to ground for faster start-up.

After the device is enabled, if the PWM pin is left floating, the output voltage of the TPS61187 regulates to the minimum output voltage. Once the device detects a voltage on the PWM pin, the TPS61187 begins to regulate the IFB pin current, as pre-set per the ISETH pin resistor, according to the duty cycle of the signal on the PWM pin.

This translated to the following plan:

1. Put minimal voltage across VIN and GND. If it doesn’t go up in smoke, probe VDDIO to see if it has some voltage.
2. If that works, check the Enable pin. If I am to drive the chip, I will need to control the state of the Enable pin. This is where an interaction with existing components might cause headaches: something else on the board might be trying to keep it high or keep it low, and if I put voltage on that pin the opposite state, I might damage that component unless I cut a trace somewhere to disconnect it.
3. I might also have to find and cut a trace for the PWM pin for the same reason.
4. Send the Enable signal, and check the voltage level across a LED string for the “minimum output voltage” mentioned by the datasheet.
5. If all of the above works, then I’ll work on how to generate the PWM dimming signal.

Plans rarely survive intact upon their first contact with reality, but I wanted to have one before I got started. It will guide me as I probe the circuit board to understand how it uses a TPS61187.

I had a broken LG laptop screen, model LP133WF2(SP)(A1), which I’ve disassembled and now I’m digging into its backlight module. I want to see if it I could make it work as a standalone diffuse light panel. I could probably wire up the LEDs directly with a voltage source and current-limiting resistor, but I also have its original integrated driver circuit board which still worked as far as I knew. I’m sure most of it were concerned with moving pixels which are no longer relevant, but there is also a TI TPS61187 chip on the board to drive the backlight section.

The PWM control signal is 3.3V friendly with a logic high threshold of 2.1V, so I could use either a 5V ATmega328 Arduino or a 3.3V ESP32. The part I didn’t understand was the power input. The datasheet says input voltage can range anywhere from 4.5V to 24V, and that it has a built-in boost converter to send up to 38V to the LED strings. I had expected to see a separate output pin for this higher voltage, but in the Typical Application schematic, the LED’s common anode is connected to the input voltage plane via a diode and an inductor. This combined with the following quote in the datasheet confused me:

there must be enough white LEDs in series to ensure the output voltage stays above the input voltage range

With the common anode seemingly tied to voltage input, I didn’t understand how the anode voltage could be higher than the input voltage. The next hypothesis is that instead of different voltage supply planes, perhaps there are separate ground planes at different levels. I saw there was a PGND pin for logic that is separate from AGND pin for the LED strings so the hypothesis had potential. But when I probed the circuit board, my meter said PGND and AGND pins are tied together on my board, eliminating the “separate ground levels” idea.

With a distinct sense that I have misunderstood something, I went to Wikipedia to learn more about boost converters and how they work. As soon as the diagrams came onscreen for that page, I realized that inductor and diode I saw earlier WAS the boost converter. I just didn’t recognize it as I was only aware of a block diagram representation and didn’t know it when the core components of a boost converter were staring at me in the schematic. Now it all makes sense how the LED string common anode voltage will be higher than the input voltage, and I feel confident enough to devise a plan.