Hot on the heels of a touchpad swap in my “new” Thinkpad T440P, come the next two upgrades: backlit keyboard and an IPS display. I shall call this machine Frankenpad as it’s rapidly deviating from the original configuration (20AWS series).
By popular demand, the breakout/passthrough combination boards family now includes a 1mm pitch variant:
This version handles up to 30 signals which seems to be a practical limit of most 1mm FPC connectors. Each signal is numbered and brought to a 0.1 in spacing header for easy connection to your favorite logger/analyzer/scope. Continue reading
Front side
Here is a product whose origin lies in the pain and suffering of an actual development project. Imagine you have a shiny new display made somewhere out there in a world that comes with a demo board and some datasheets. So you take a display, hook it up to your favorite development board and try to follow the documentation. Except nothing works. And yet a a demo next to you works well, but is very tiny, has no test points and not documented. So you poke at the fine pitch flex connector with a scope for a bit, and realize you need a better way to capture what’s going on. Off you go to the lab and cobble together what is essentially a pass-through: two FPC breakout boards back to back, with a 0.1″ header in between.
Now you can hook up your trusty Saleae Logic analyzer and look at what the demo board is actually sending down as opposed to what the datasheet says it should. This board is exactly that, but made into one neat package. It can handle standard 0.5mm pitch FPC connectors up to 40 pins wide.
A while back I did a teardown on a vintage multimeter- Weston 6000. The 38 years old LCD was dead, but otherwise I saw signs of life in the meter. So I figured I’d try recreating the display using modern components. Continue reading
I’ve always wanted to see what the latest LCD panels look like inside, and such a chance just presented itself. I got my hands on a broken 15.6″ panel, used in many laptops these days. This particuar one had DP/N number on it, so I assume it was used in a Dell. Let us see how much we can learn looking at the design with limited access to device datasheets.
Innolux BT156GW