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 1024x768, which wouldn't even be worth the effort to resurrect. Fortunately, this LG Philips LP154W02 panel has a decently respectable 1680x1050 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 1680x1050. 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.

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