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.
2 Likes
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).
2 Likes
Yea you are basically correct about that afaik. I think the standard is set by VESA. I’m unsure why OLED manufacturers chose to abandon the standard.
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.
1 Like