- This here is a flexible,
AMOLED phone screen.
Now, Have I made a folding iPhone with this?
Not yet,
(laughing)
I'm playing some dirty tricks to make iOS show up on here.
It is live and connected to a real iPhone,
but not everything is quite as it appears.
However, this is super cool technology.
And I think there are some real possibilities.
I'm Scotty from strange parts,
let's take a closer look at this thing.
(upbeat music)
Rumor has it
that Apple has been working on a folding iPhone,
but it's likely still quite ways off.
However, ever since the galaxy fold came out,
I've been wondering,
is it possible for me to make my own folding iPhone,
could I take apart a fold and use the screen from that?
Or could I buy a screen?
And it was mostly just this idea
that was bouncing around in the back of my head
for over a year or two now.
But recently,
a friend of mine, Timon sent me a link to an AliExpress shop
that had some flexible screens for sale.
And so of course,
I had to buy some and test them out.
This first screen is the one that I showed at the beginning.
It's quite flexible, and very thin.
It's only about point three millimeters thick,
which is roughly three sheets of paper.
The resolution is 1080 by 2160,
which is pretty good.
Now, this is the second screen.
And let me get that plugged in here.
So you'll notice right away
that the colors are a lot richer, the blacks are blacker.
However, this screen is far more rigid.
It's also a lot more thick
and it has kind of some built in curves,
which add further rigidity.
However, if you turn this screen over,
and we look at the back of this one side by side,
you'll notice they look very similar.
And I think these screens are actually the same screen,
except for this piece right here,
which is an added on digitizer for the screen.
Now the digitizer is the piece of electronics
that registers your touches on the screen.
I don't think this screen has a digitizer
that obviously this is not populated here.
However, there are a couple pins up here,
a couple traces up here on the screen itself
that don't have anything connected to them.
So it's possible that those are a digitizer
built into the screen itself.
Intrusion, gen fashion.
I don't have the data sheets
for either one of these screens.
(laughing)
Well, no, that's not true.
They do come with data sheets,
but they don't even list the original manufacturer,
I had to figure that out for myself
by peeling up black tape
that was covering some of the markings on here.
I believe these screens are manufactured
by a Chinese display manufacturer called BOE.
And I believe they're discontinued.
So these screens are probably either factory seconds,
or they were leftovers
from some manufacturing run of a phone or something.
As far as how I'm driving these screens,
they came with this adapter board for HDMI.
So you plug in HDMI, and then it runs the screen.
And for testing,
I've got it plugged into a Raspberry Pi 4,
which is running a piece of software called RPiPlay
which imitates the airplay protocol.
And then I've got this iPhone doing screen mirroring
over WiFi to the Raspberry Pi 4,
which then drives the screen via HDMI.
And so that's the dirty tricks
that I was talking about at the beginning.
But I really wanted to see
what a flexible screen would look like
with iOS on it before I did all of the hard engineering work
to hook them up directly.
The other thing to point out
is that these screens are quite fragile.
Which shouldn't be a surprise to you
if you've been following the whole Galaxy fold thing.
But this screen in particular has a bit of damage
up here in the corner.
Far worse than that,
is this screen, which was damaged while shooting
and well let me just let you see for yourself.
This here is a flexible AMOLED phone screen.
That I may have just broken.
This was a pretty expensive mistake
both in terms of money and time.
Each of those screens cost me about $500
and I had to wait a couple weeks
to get a new one shipped from China.
The one small silver lining is that I found a Taobao seller
who was willing to sell them to me for about $250 a piece.
So it wasn't quite as expensive a mistake
as it could have been.
So what's involved in trying to make my own folding iPhone?
First, I got to find a screen that's both flexible enough
and has a built in digitizer,
which I haven't found yet.
Second, I need to figure out
how to get the iPhone logic board
to talk to the display.
And the good news there
is that they both likely speak the same protocol,
which is MIPI DSI.
Now MIPI stands for Mobile Industry Processor Interface,
which is a collection of standards.
And DSI stands for Display Serial Interface,
which is specifically for screens and displays,
and it's used in most phones and tablets.
However, the bad news is that
while MIPI is technically an open standard,
you really got to be a big company with a lot of money
and sign lots of NDA's
to even get access to the documentation about how it works.
And not only that,
but unlike HDMI,
where you can reasonably expect
to just plug a random display into a random device
and have them more or less work.
That's not the case with MIPI.
MIPI defines how the data is sent between the phone
and the screen
but it doesn't even define a standard connector,
let alone a full set of commands
for configuring the display.
So the notion that you could just plug a random display
into a phone
and have it send all the right configuration and data
such that an image shows up correctly,
it's not very realistic.
And the idea that I could just pop off an iPhone screen
and swap it out for a flex screen,
it's not that simple.
Not at all.
I definitely need to make some sort of adapter board
to go between the screen and the iPhone logic board.
And I don't have good open documentation on either side.
I don't have good data sheets
for any of the screens
that describe what configuration commands to send them.
And iOS is closed source.
So trying to modify it
to get it to send the right configuration commands,
even if I knew what they were,
might be a next to impossible task.
And not only that,
I'd still have to design the physical phone shell itself
with hinges and other protections
to make sure that the screen doesn't break
when it's folded and unfolded,
similar to what's been happening
with the Samsung Galaxy folds.
So am I going to build a folding iPhone?
I don't know.
I have started work with a friend of mine
who's a far better hardware hacker than I am
on figuring out some of the preliminary steps
to see if this is possible.
So we'll see.
We might beat Apple to the punch
and have the first folding iPhone.
I don't know.
Stay tuned.
Real quick. before you go.
I have a few updates on strange parts.
Yes, it has been quite a while since I posted a video,
but I've been busy this whole time,
I have a new shop,
I've started a new channel.
And now we have a strange parts of discord.
So first off,
I started a second channel for all the things
that don't make it into strange parts videos,
which is actually quite a lot
and it's something I've been wanting to do for a while.
I'm gonna be posting a tour of the new shop
in the next few days.
So make sure to either click up here
or down in the description and hit the subscribe button
so that you don't miss that.
I also wanna take apart the screen that I broke
when I was shooting this video
and look at it under the microscope.
So I'll probably be posting a tear down video
on the second channel in like the next week
or two or so.
Second, there is now a strange parts discord.
And you can find an invite link to that
down in the description.
I hang out there pretty much every day.
And we've got a really nice group
of like minded folks there.
So everybody is welcomed.
And then lastly,
would you do me a huge favor?
Can you take a few minutes and fill out a survey,
it'll help me better understand
who you are and what sort of things you like
so that not only I can better steer
the direction of strange parts,
but also so that I can convince sponsors
to help me make more awesome videos.
There's a link up here and down in the description.
Thank you in advance for taking the time to do that.
I can't tell you how helpful it is.
And with that,
I hope you're all staying safe and healthy
and that you've weathered 2020 as best you can.
It was definitely a rough year for me.
And I finally feel like I'm seeing
the light on the other side.
I've got a bunch more ambitious projects coming up
and a bunch more videos on the way.
So I'll see you again soon.
Take care