So I was pretty sure this didn’t work. I got my adapter board a while back and plugged it in and no dice… the ribbon cable got warm suggesting something was up and I unplugged. Fortunately nothing damaged.
I then took another look and realised I had routed one of the GND pins to the ‘wrong’ GND (as labelled) on the monitor… so I ordered a new board with this ‘fixed’ and tried again… but still no dice, the exact same problem.
I was about ready to give up, but figured I best stare at the PCB again and double check everything. I went through it, carefully checking the pins went to the right place, which they looked like they did… as a last ditch I thought I would double check the ‘pin 1’ of the monitor connector corresponded to the schematic I was using and what would you know it wasn’t… I had literally been wiring the whole thing up ‘back to front’ - pin 1 into pin 30 and vice versa.
So I fixed that and ordered a new board. It came this morning, plugged in and worked!
I’ll share the EasyEDA files when I have a second, but this will not work for all 30-pin displays, only those with the same pin configuration as the one I’m using.
Not sure if they ever managed to get the touchscreen detached however.
Edit: Actually missed that they seemed to be mistaken - that spin 713 screen is the exact same screen but with a touch overlay… not OLED.
Sooo… maybe I am also the first third party screen. Although any BOE 40-pin (assuming the same pin layout, and BOE screens seem to reflect the VESA standard) should connect up directly I guess.
You should be able to use that to directly order from JLCPCB by following some basic “how-to” pages on how to get from an EasyEDA design to a JLCPCB order, JLCPCB will do the SMD components for you as well. 5 boards cost $20 delivered to the UK with one of their regular coupons.
You are obviously responsible for your own DIY adventures. If the pins and voltages match up you should be golden, but if you aren’t prepared to eat the cost of a dead board you probably shouldn’t be mucking around with DIY-ing such things.
Yes, once the chipset drivers are installed I can adjust brightness using the Windows slider - I assume this is what the FW Keyboard would control if you were using that, but I can’t test that.
Hey Dylan, thank you for the reply. You are right - I hadn’t checked 2 lane 40 pin vs 4 lane 40pin as u/runoono mentioned. I’ve now checked the pinout of the board you designed - the pinout is the same as the one i want to get. I will likely try to get your board printed and use that as a test.
In the longer run will have to figure out if i can design and print one similar to the item i shared with you as i think a pcb is too thick to put behind the screen
Great, I hope it works for you - in regards to it being too thick - is there anywhere else you can store the ‘adapter’ and/or have you looked at the 0.6mm PCBs from the likes of JLCPCB? They also do ‘flexible PCBs’ which are very thin.
One alternative is to purchase a 30 pin edp cable (non fpc type) and splice it together with the FW 40-pin. Very fiddly though.
So this kinda thing isn’t really PCB design in the classic sense (that is also out of my depth).
All this is really is linking up wires… think of it like splicing two cables together but doing so on a PCB.
Learning to do that is something you should be able to pick up relatively easily. I think I had designed one similar thing before making this adapter. As i note above, when you are screwing with this stuff you have to accept the possibility you will screw something up and end up with a dead mainboard - I got this adapter wrong like 3 times through being a bit dumb and every time I could have linked the wrong pins and burned something out. I don’t want to discourage you, just be clear that you should only tinker with this kinda stuff if you are prepared for the worst.
All that said, you can just get the PCB I have designed above manufactured by JLCPCB on a 0.6mm board (obviously it still have the height of the components) - but it is quite expensive.
If I was trying to fit a cable into an existing laptop chassis I would be tempted to splice together two cables so there was no PCB adapter to worry about. Would need careful soldering and double and triple checking what you are connecting up, but would do away with the potentially cumbersome PCB.
Thanks - the 0.6 mm pcb is an option i’ll consider. I am also looking at getting a small volume of 4-lane 40-pin to 2-lane 30-pin edp adapter made if its not too expensive. I’ve dug in more and basically at this point I have bought an external edp driver to test out future screens so as not to brick my laptop. I am however increasingly confident that other than OLEDs, a lot of screens basically do follow the standard pinouts(will definitely have to verify one by one though prior to using such screen).
There isn’t really a standard for edp pinouts set by anyone, just a set de-facto standards. Vesa specifies how some parts work electrically, the rest is between the display manufacturer and the laptop manufacturers.
For oleds while inconvenient for us it does make some sense to change the pin-out. Since the actual oled panels are very thin compared to lcds it does make sense to offload some of the electronics to the main-board to be able to actually make use of that thinness (otherwise you’d have a thin panel with some not as thin electronics taped to it). Some oleds still have the electronics onboard and use the “standard” pin-outs, others expect you to do some or all the voltage conversion work on the mainboard and have a quite a lot weirder pin-out.
For our application since we are replacing a tick lcd we can just put the conversion electronics between the laptop and the display and either stick it behind the panel or somewhere else but for some panels it’ll need to be done if you don’t want magic smoke to escape somewhere.
Do you think that this would work without modification to convert from the framework motherboard port to the cable on this screen model ?
I get that the site doesnt have pin-out so its not conclusive to say but am I at least understanding correctly that you solved a similar situation (with possibly different type 30pin 2lane eDP screen)
Yes my above solution is similar in that it adapts the Frame work 40pin to a 30pin screen. But without knowing the pinout of the linked screen it’s impossible to be sure.
I can say the 30pin screen I used is fairly ‘standard’, but there are plenty of screens that stray from this standard.
Hmm well might as well try and see not that there seems to be much other options
When I try to place an order through the editor at the project page it seems like the I-PEX 20455-040E-76 is out of stock? Is this Lian Xin Technology 20455-040E-66 equivalent component? It seems to look right in the placement window just swapping it through the part search screen but I havent ordered pcbs before so Im unsure does it need to be changed for the project files too?
