You can buy digital photo frames/wall art displays online, but they’re not really very good value. This random brand 13” one is £90 and only 1280x800!
Recently the backlight on my laptop screen stopped working properly. If I had it above minimum, after a few minutes it would start flickering and then turn off completely. Minimum brightness was not too dim, and fine in most cases. But problematic if I was reading text in a bright environment, so I replaced it myself.
Now I just had this very thin laptop display lying around and I wanted to find some way to re-use it. Now a laptop display doesn’t just have a bog standard HDMI connector or anything, that obviously wouldn’t fit inside the frame. Instead it has an EDP connector, which is a very thin ribbon cable.
I found out you can actually buy these boards online for ~£20 that connect via EDP to a laptop display and expose a mini-HDMI (for some reason) interface to allow you to connect a normal device to it! They even include a separate button daughter-board that lets you adjust brightness, etc.
So I’m going to stick my laptop display on my wall, and the board too, and then run a mini-hdmi cable over to an original Raspberry Pi B+ my dad got me for Christmas back when they first came out. That way I can have a low cost, low power usage wall art display that runs Linux!
Board arrived. Realised the only PSU I have that is correct size is European for some reason. Will order one off Ebay.
Also started thinking about how I’m mounting this. Decided I’ll definitely print an enclosure for the control board, so need to get that designed before I go to my parents’ next week so I can print it off there. Also thinking about how to mount the actual display. I don’t really want to add any sort of enclosure as it removes from the minimalism. But also wary of applying stress to the screen when I end up removing it. Maybe just a backing plate that can be adhesived on to it, and then use 3M velcro thing to attach the backing plate to the wall.