 Why in the world would you ever want to build your own monitor? I mean, there are already a ton of good, cheap monitors out there that would be as good or better than something that you build yourself. In fact, we showed off a few of them recently. Well, the answer lies not necessarily in using this puny little screen as your main display, but rather in giving it a new lease on life as a secondary or even like tertiary display. And the best part is, if you're anything like me and you hoard a bunch of old technology, you may already have a panel that's just waiting to be reclaimed from an old laptop or tablet. So today, we're going to show you just how easy it is to make your own monitor from just a couple of cheap parts and a little bit of creativity. Speaking of creativity, how creative is this segue to our sponsor, Ridge Wallet? Ridge Wallet is a sleek way to keep wallet bulge down with their compact frame and RFID blocking inner plates. Use offer code LINUS to save 10% and get free worldwide shipping today. So first up here is the star of the show, the panel. So ours here is probably something you've seen before. It's a super common 15.6 inch IPS panel with a resolution of 1920 by 1080. Next up is something you probably haven't seen before. This right here is an embedded DisplayPort controller, which is roughly analogous to the scaler module that you would find in a typical desktop monitor. So this here converts the HDMI signal that's coming out of your graphics card into a signal that the panel here can understand. So we purchased both our LCD and our EDP adapter from eBay. But guys, before you go out and like buy a screen, take a look on Craigslist or at local electronics recyclers like FreeGeek and see if you can find something that doesn't need to be shipped. You might be able to score a deal and get some of that bonus karma for keeping a perfectly good screen from going to waste. Wherever you get your panel, once you've got it, the first thing you're going to want to do is establish what specific connector it uses. So the most common connector that you're going to find on 1080p panels like this one is a 30 pin EDP connector like the one I'm holding here. Now if you do decide to harvest your LCD from a laptop or otherwise, make sure to verify that the connector on the back matches with the display adapter that you choose. Another word of warning, if you plan on using an old iPad or a MacBook, do a little extra research and make sure that you can even find an adapter for it. Apple has this tendency to use proprietary connectors for their displays. I know. I'm shocked. Moving on now then to the brains of the operation, our display adapter. Now in addition to acting as a signal converter here, this provides our on-screen display, which hopefully will allow us to adjust things like screen brightness, contrast and all that kind of good stuff. It's really easy to gloss over how important this little driver is and even harder to believe that it only costs 20 bucks. Now that we've got all the components of our display figured out here, the next thing we need to do is be responsible and boot it up and make sure it works before we assemble the whole thing. Then we're going to put it in that frame over there and try and use it as an actual monitor. The golden end goes into the bottom of the monitor just like that. Just be careful when you're putting these in. These are quite fragile connectors. They're not intended, you know, like a USB plug to be unplugged and plugged back in and all that stuff. And then on the other side, we've got a little flip up plastic piece here and then our contacts go down so that they touch the pins on the inside of the connector. We slide it in and then lock it down like that. Oh, we do it a lot more evenly than that. That's better. We found this 12 volt 3 amp power adapter in a bin. Now all I need is my laptop. All right, let's see. Hey, well that was painless. Look at that. I wonder if our OSD works. Menu. And it's in Korean. So with that out of the way, all we need now is this little baggie of 256 and 440 screws and nuts. This little knife here for cleaning up our 3D prints. This screwdriver for screwing everything together. And in the interest of completeness, this power drill that we actually only use just to... The clearances were a little tight on the holes for the on-screen display. So we loosen them a little bit and now it's fine, but I won't actually use that on camera. So for all the details on these parts, guys, you can check out the forum link in the description where we have all of the components, the 3D models, the fasteners, and where you can find them if you wanted to do something like this for yourself. Now the real bulk of this project was actually getting all these parts printed. The design that we used is from Fox underscore EXE on Thingiverse. So we got to give huge kudos to him for a pretty well thought out design, especially how the back panels interlock with the EDP adapter case. With that being said, the design is clearly marked as being a work in progress. So we did find some areas that needed improvements, and we've uploaded the remix of his design for you guys to enjoy. So you'll need to print 17 parts in total. So be prepared to spend some time cleaning up 3D prints for this project, as between the successful ones and the less successful ones, there are probably going to be quite a few of them. So with all that out of the way, we're ready to build. So step number one for us is going to be assembling the base. Now this was one piece that we did have to reassemble, and honestly, our solution, it's not perfect, but it's functional enough. So you go ahead and you pop the top of the stand in here. Just, yeah, there we go. And then this loop right here kind of hooks onto it and holds it in place. If you want it to hold more securely, what you could do is put a big washer on here, and then screw it in from this side. And thread that through the 3D printed hole in the back. It'll just kind of self tap in there. And that would hold it better, but honestly, our monitor's not heavy enough that we consider that to be an issue. So we're just going to go ahead and pop that on there. Boom! Stand, just like that. Next, we're going to lay down our display panel, and we're going to arrange these four pieces like so. You can tell the top pieces from the bottom pieces, from the extra little nubbins that they have for the components at the bottom of the panel. We pre-installed the bottom bezel here just because it's a little bit of a pain in the butt, but with some elbow grease, you'll get it on there. Just going to go ahead and pop that on. There we go. Now's a good time to reinstall the ribbon cable from the monitor. So I'm going to go ahead and pop that on there. Then we're going to route it up here, because that's where we're ultimately going to need it. For bonus points, you can do a little bit of cable management here. Have it come out about like so. That's going to make the finished install a little bit tidier. Now that we're at this stage, we can go ahead and insert our buttons in the rest of the front bezel. So we just go ahead and pop this puppy on. There you go. Look at that. Do they work? Hey, nice. All right, so we're going to throw this on here. There we go. And then this piece is a little bit finicky, guys, but yeah. Let's make sure that our buttons are all still exposed. All right, so we're using our shorter screws here, and these will help hold together our bottom bezel. So now we put the rest of our backing back in place, and we can go ahead and connect our EDP adapter. I'm sure you guys expect nothing less, but I'm going to mention it anyway. Once again, it's a little bit finicky here as we position our port saw on the corresponding holes. You can see that actually lines up quite nicely, though. And then our ribbon cable through this gap here in the housing. Now that these are installed, we're going to go ahead and flip it around like this. You can see there's a little notch here where the cables come out. One thing that will help you get this lined up is it's going to be hard to see in the camera, but there's little guides to kind of lock all these pieces in place. There we go. So theoretically, once they're all in there, it's not going to move around too much, and it should screw right in. Then we get these parts, which are going to attach to our stand, and we put them on right here. And it's finally time to screw the thing together with hopefully all those holes aligned. And we're going to use our long screws this time around. So now we can pick it up. You can see it's a little floppy there. That's why there's these clips. So these go on a little something like that. Boop. And there it is. Boop. And that, for better or for worse, is a monitor now. A perfect monitor? No, don't be stupid. But it's a monitor. Now we're going to take one of our 440 screws and we're going to put it through here with a nut on the other side. We need quite a bit of clamping force, which is why we're going to use a nut rather than just relying on threading into the 3D filament. I'm going to tighten this up because this is what's going to keep our monitor from tilting when we don't want it to. See how that holds on there? Yeah. Now the other side. There we go. Oh, not bad. Pretty tight. All right. There we go, ladies and gentlemen. It's a monitor. It's alive. Actually, I don't know if it's alive yet. Okay, so let's plug our power adapter in. HDMI goes in. Hey, well, that's great. That makes sense. That's cool. These are designed to have the back of a laptop on them so you can actually see the backlight fire up here. Yeah, check it out. Give me a sec. There it is. It's lit. Boom secondary monitor just like that. Note guys, the original plan did kind of call for side bezels, but they were either incomplete or we couldn't find them or some combination of the two. And all it would really serve to do is put a bigger bezel on it. So we just didn't really worry about it. We do have a bit of a problem though. Our brightness sucks. So fortunately, oh, speaking of things that suck, our menu ain't great. That button's jammed. Okay, we never said it was perfect. There we go. Okay, that's our brightness cranked. It would be really nice if I could find the English option. Hey, there it is. English. Yay. Fantastic. Okay, let's have a look at what options we have here. Dynamic contrast ratio. So basically it'll dim on darker scenes and brighten up on brighter ones. Eco mode, brightness contrast, and that's like basically it. Depending on what we're using it for, for a secondary display, maybe that's all we need. So there you go, guys. Is it perfect? No, but it's functional. And my favorite part of this project is that while we may have taken the easy path, just making a desktop monitor out of a laptop panel here, there are so many possibilities for these cheap panels. You can use the same hardware that we're using here to build an in-desk Spotify screen or a smart mirror or heck. You could even build a screen into the side of your computer if you want. Speaking of which, make sure you're subscribed because we've got a build planned in NZXT's sexy case with the screen built into the side panel. It's finally available. But that's a topic for another day. What isn't is this segue to our sponsor, iFixit. The iFixit ProTech Tool Kit is designed to help you tackle any electronics repair challenge. It includes over 13 different tools including their 64-bit steel screwdriver kit, the Jimmy, a flexible steel prying blade, a small suction cup for removing glass panels from phones and tablets, and all iFixit tools are backed by a lifetime warranty. You don't need to be a genius to fix your electronics. You just need the right tools. So visit iFixit.com forward slash Linus and pick up your ProTech Tool Kit today. So thanks for watching, guys. Hope you enjoyed and we will see you at our next video. Yeah, not perfect. But functional.