There are plenty of instructions online on how to remove the screen from an iPad 1
for some reason, I found this quite difficult.
It didn't help that the glass was already broken and seems to be very ready to splinter.
Safety glasses are definitely recommended!
After a bit of effort, I've got a nice screen and I've got a couple of speakers.
I'll save the speakers for anothe project.
There's not really much more that can be salvaged, the batteries are completely dead
and that just leaves the motherboard which can't really be used for much.
This particular screen is an LP097X02.
Looking on eBay we find plenty of driver boards that will run this LCD will and take an HDMI feed.
I've purchased one of these boards and it comes with some buttons and an IR receiver - we probably won't need these.
It comes with a driver for the backlight
and it comes with the main video board which has an HDMI, VGA and composite inputs
Hooking this all together actually gives us a working display.
I'm pretty pleased!
I've got a project in mind for this display.
But first I'd like to thank the PCBWay for sponsoring this video.
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Onto the project
I built this magic mirror some time ago and I used a Fire tablet for the display.
I'd like to liberate the tablet and replace it with a Pi-Zero and my salvaged screen.
My magic mirror software is actually pretty simple, it's just a web page
so I'm planning on running a web browser in kiosk mode
I know there are lots of great options for magic-mirror software - leave your suggestions in the comments.
I've got some interesting plans to do some fun stuff with the camera, but I think that's for a later project.
To setup the Zero I've burnt an SD Card with Raspberry PI OS.
I haven't got a keyboard or mouse to connect.
so I'm going to enable SSH by creating an empty file on the SD Card called "ssh".
I'll also get it to connect to WiFi by creating a wpa_supplicant.conf file and filling it with my WiFi details.
Once it's all wired up, it actually works!
The Pi Zero is talking to my new screen.
There's a couple of steps to finish off.
We'll ssh onto the machine and start the config tool
The first thing to do is to set the correct screen resolution.
Currently, there's a black border around the display. And I want it to fill the entire screen.
I'll also switch on VNC while I'm here so I can connect to the GUI.
We'll need to change the hostname - I've already got a Raspberry Pi in my network and at the moment they'll be conflicting.
And then the final thing I want to do is change the screen orientation to portrait.
This is done in /boot/config.txt
And we just add a line "display_rotate=1"
A quick reboot and we're now able to connect using VNC.
I'll finish up the setup and then I want to install some software to hide the mouse.
The worst thing to do would be to have a magic mirror with a mouse cursor right in the middle of it.
I'm going to use an app called unclutter - and I'm going to add this to my .bashrc file so it runs on startup.
The final step of our setup is to auto start the chromium-browser in full screen mode.
To do this we need to create an autostart file in .config/lxsession/LXDE-pi
and we add the command to launch chromium-browser in kiosk mode and point it at our magic mirror URL.
With this finished, we now boot straight into our magic mirror.
Let's move onto the actual mirror upgrade.
I need a way to power the Pi.
Initially, I was thinking that I could just tap off the 12 volt supply for the display
board and feed that to the Zero's regulator.
But reading up on this we find that it actually has a very limited voltage range
So it won't work with 12 volts coming in. We'll probably actually blow it up.
My second plan was to take a feed from the video board
unfortunately, this only has 3.3volts available.
The Pi is pretty interesting - it actually needs 3.3v and 1.8v rail to work.
So we can't just feed in 3.3v.
We need to give it 5v to its regulator so it can generate both the voltage rails
Fortunately, I've got one of these buck converter boards.
And the video board also has a handy 12 volt power output.
So I've wired this up we can wire this up and we get a nice 5v.
So it works pretty nicely. We've got a good supply for the Zero.
Let's get everything assembled.
I'm taping over the edges and covering the rear of the LCD to prevent light leakage.
To provide some structure I've got some craft cardboard and I'm cutting insets into this
for the circuit boards so they don't protrude too much.
Glueing this onto some stiff card provides a bit more structure
and also provides a nice dark background to make the two-way mirror work.
Final assembly is a bit of a bodge job, there's definitely scope for tidying this up with some 3D printing.
I've added a bit of extra black card to the back to prevent any light from getting in around the edges of the screen.
Initial impressions are that it works, but it's not quite as good as the Fire Tablet screen
I've turned the brightness down to zero and the screen is still visible.
To fix this I'm sticking some tinted acetate sheets in front of the screen.
This will decrease the amount of light being transmitted and should give us a better effect.
It works!
I'm pretty pleased with that.
I've now got quite a flexible magic mirror.
I'm looking forward to doing something fun with the camera and making the mirror more interactive.
All in all a pretty successful project.
I'm happy to have salvaged a bit of technology that would have been going to landfill.
I hope you enjoyed the process - I certainly enjoyed making it
let me know in the comments what you think.
I'll see you in the next video!