I quickly discovered several reasons why a computer monitor makes for a poor lamp within an hour of bolting one to the bottom of an IKEA LACK coffee table serving as horizontal mounting stand. The original motivation was to have a for a polarized light source and it worked well enough to give me a few neat pictures. But its inefficiency meant it was relative dim for the power consumed, turning that power into a lot of heat, and it made non-backlit LCD screens (with their own polarization filters) unreadable at certain angles.

I still want polarized light capability for my workbench light, but it should be an optional component for only when it is useful. Similar to the corresponding camera lens polarization filter which I can remove as needed. I also want the light to be more efficient so it doesn't waste as much power as heat. Leading to my next attempt, pulling from my stack of salvaged laptop screen backlights. They are very energy efficient as they were designed for battery-powered devices. I had successfully transferred a few of their corresponding polarization filters to a sheet of clear acrylic. And I kept the laptop lid backing to serve as mechanical mounting frames. This is what I will convert to an energy efficient polarization-optional workbench light.

There's a LED controller with associated voltage boost converter on this circuit board, but this time I'm going with the brute-force approach just to see how well it works. If I burn out something, that's a lesson learned! If it works well enough, that saves me the effort of trying to figure out how to interface with a backlight controller.

The backlight FPC (flexible printed circuit) connector is too small for me to use comfortably, so I'm going to repurpose just one end of the original circuit board. Using my LED backlight tester, I mapped out the copper pads corresponding to LEDs. In this specific example, there are six parallel strings that draw 20mA at around 32.2V. Since white LEDs in my experience drop a little over 3V each, that implied each string had 10 LEDs. 6*10 = 60 small surface-mounted LEDs inside this backlight module should shine quite nicely, once I find a way to power them.