Hardware Anybody tried converting a mac to normal screen?

[FAST6191]

On the workbench right now is an old 2010 vintage mac (a1312 if you are curious). The cowboys in the repair shop said it might be power, graphics, ribbons or the logic/motherboard and quoted some £500 to replace the lot so it was instead sent to me to look at.

I ruled out the power board and ribbons which leaves the graphics and motherboard. I am leaning more towards the graphics as that is what others have and would be most fitting, however I do not have a reballing setup or £250 to spend on a guess for a graphics card that otherwise costs £25 for the same parts in PC land, let alone to then discover it was the logic board all along.

I spoke to the owners and they are probably about to tell me to scrap it and send the hard drive back in a caddy. Being a mac that probably should have been done out of the factory but that is a different discussion. With that being said the monitor is a 27 inch IPS 2560x1440 samsung panel with not so many hours on it and one I have no desire to see head binwards.

Searching did not reveal any adapter kits but did net me the nice pinouts, power/voltage, timings, protocols and other stuff electrical designers need to know type spec sheet for the panel which rather nicely uses 30 pin internal displayport. This leaves me inclined to bust out my drill and soldering iron, probably with an eye to adapting the mac case, power and just bypassing the rest.

Anybody been in my position and have some advice to offer?

 

[TecXero]

It's been a while since I worked on one of those all-in-one macs. I seem to remember the video connection was just using a type of VGA (it was an older model), just without the standard sockets. I'd imagine something newer would just be using DVI or HDMI. Beyond that, I can't help much without getting my hands on one. I'd just carefully test every wire to get an idea of what's what then identify what standard the results line up with best. After that, I'd wire it up and do some trial and error, using the results to estimate a starting point.

 

[FAST6191]

Spent part of the afternoon wandering around the internet. Learned more than I might have cared to about embedded displayport (eDP), probably pointlessly as well as most people speaking about found a source for the panels but not the stuff to drive it and if I am going to piggyback off the existing hardware then it is all good, but if not then it should only be some minor DC to DC conversion for some stuff.

The PDF I probably should have linked the first time around ( LM270WQ1 Liquid Crystal Display Product Specification ).

Now to find something with a displayport out around here, that or do something very silly like buy a DVI converter for it and add potential failure points to a reverse engineering project like a silly person.

I do not know if I will document this one fully, and it would never have been an instructables type guide anyway, but I will try to summarise it all when it is all said and done.