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In the year 2000, Ben Heckendorn built his first mod.
“Ben: We can rebuild it, smaller – better – portable.
Since then he has continued his work, helping those in need with creating new projects. If you have an idea you would like to see built, why not send it to The Ben Heck Show.
“Ben: Hello and welcome back to the Beck Heck show. Now in this episode, we are going to do things a little differently. There is not going to be a viewer challenge, instead we are going to work on a project that I have been wanting to build for several years now.
Let me explain the idea behind it. As many of you are no doubt aware, it is quite difficult to fully open a standard laptop computer on an airplane. If the person in front of you leans their seat back at all, it becomes mostly impossible. My intention is to modify a laptop in such a way that the screen can be positioned above the keyboard while allowing you a great view and comfortable typing.
To do this we will hack-up the LCD portion of a laptop, build it into a new enclosure with custom mounting arms for it. Let’s get started.”
“Ben: We’ve got a Toshiba laptop here. I don’t need that. These are eerily familiar to the coffin padding they used to have in the X-Box 360. There is no webcam or anything else up here on the screen so there should be minimal amounts of components for us to rewire. One of the reasons I picked this model, besides it being cheap, was I can see the very obvious screw-holes.
See that? Alright, the frame comes off pretty easy, it just kind of flips around. Now we can see the friction-hinges here, which cause it to go back and forth. The back lid is not held on by anything, really. It appears to be a metal sub-frame actually holding the LCD in place. This part here where the data comes in, this is basically where the magic happens on the LCD.
It is also one of the more fragile parts. See how it connects to the glass in these spots? So you want to be very gentle around here. It is actually an LED back-lit LCD screen, which is pretty impressive considering how cheap it was. See the power right there going to the LED lighting?”
“Ben: This kind of shows the proof of concept. I have removed the LCD from the arms and rested it on the end of the arms. The reason I did that was to see if the arms have enough strength to hold the full weight of the LCD at the end of the arms rather than with the weight spread across them. And as you can see, they do.
The LCD with the LED back-lit is really quite light, so it is actually going to be in the unit kind of like this. So, now we can see how far to extend the cable. I have carefully sliced apart the data cable going into the top of the LCD on the laptop. It might look like a big mess, but it actually is not too bad. In the olden days, the computers would have flat-flex ribbing cable going and curling up around the engine and going up to the LCD.
You really couldn’t do anything with it, but this we can actually, believe it or not, hack up and extend. Now I want to go slow with the hack on this. So I have cut one of the wires for the video connection and I am going to pointlessly extend it. This will show me two things: A.) if I can wire things to extend the wires, and B.) if extending the wires will affect performance. It shouldn’t, but I am going to test it a little before I test it a lot. There are the redone connections, here is the twisted pair represented as a long piece of ribbon cable. This is longer than we need, so let’s test it.
Oh no, we seem to have lost image and the reflection on the screen doesn’t count. Okay, now it is working. What we did differently was use some thin solid strand of cabling, such as what you would find on an alter ATA card-drive. You have to use the thin wire, which looks like this. Quite often if you try to rewire high-speed suited devices with stranded thicker ribbon cable, like what we tried first, it won’t work.”
“Ben: It is going slowly. I am extending all of the wires you can see here, but I can only extend them one or two at a time because if you use the wrong thickness wire, like single-strand instead of stranded – it causes it not to work. As you can see here, I had to use the thicker wire to keep the LCD back-lighting working. It is going slowly, but that is the thing, only make one or two modifications at a time – test, more modifications – test, more modifications – test.
That way you can rewind one step, like an undo button and find out where the problem was. If you hack too much at once, we will never know where the problem was. We will end up redoing everything to possibly just fix one thing. The wire has now been extended, so now we can work at making the new bracket. Alright, here it a test, here is the jerk in front of me who leans his seat back – but in this configuration I can see the screen and have it fully open even with this that close.” “I am on a fake plane.”
“Ben: Let’s take a break from this project to work on another laptop project, the Xbox 360. In this episode, we are going to be rewiring some things on the mother-board so we can fit it better into the case.”
“Ben: What we need to do is rewire some of the components on it so it will fit better. If you take a look at the board, you see some obvious things that jot out and need to be replaced. The rind-of-light assembly here, the wireless adapter back here – those are two most obvious ones. Now luckily, these both unplug so they are meant to be removed, which means we can remove them easily and rewire the connectors. Zoom in on that, magnify, clean it up a little.
Notice that not all the connectors are the same, there are actually two grounds, so that means we don’t actually have to re-hookup everything – just the discrete connections. To make it easier to solder wires to this, I am going to add some lead solder to each of these points. We have attached some wires to the wireless connector here. Now we have plugged the wireless connector back into the mother-board so we can double-check the connections. Here is how we are going to do it. Okay, that is pin one, so we know this red one goes here.
It is good to double-check this stuff, hook it back up in its original configuration then rewire it slowly so you know you are doing it exactly right. Now, we are going to put some Velcro here so we can mount the wire. Next up is the ring-of-light. It is a similar procedure except there are more wires. What we are going to do is cut the ribbon-cable in such a way that it will go between the lower pins and reach up to the bottom pins. That way it is flat. The connector has 7 + 6 rows, so 13 total pins. But, I am actually superstitious enough to add an extra ground to make it an even 14.
So, we are going to separate the wires. One down, one up, one down, one up then we are going to cut the bottom row of 7 shorter. Now the green stuff on the circuit-board is called solder-mask. It is to mask the solder to only go in the spots you want it. When doing connections like these, don’t worry if your wires and pins overlap or even touch the surface of the circuit-board.
As long as there is solder-mask there, the green stuff, it won’t short-circuit anything. Next, we estimate on how long to make the cable. We do this by taking our frame - the ring-of-light goes there. It has to reach here-ish, about that long. Take our ribbon cable from the ring-of-light and solder it to a header. You may remember us doing this in Episode 1 when we made that controller. Always build things you can take apart because if you build something you can’t take apart, then chances are it won’t work. You will have to take it apart and you won’t be able to and you will be sitting there slicing apart hot-glue and cursing to the heavens above.
Once again, we plug the item into the X-Box so we can verify that we have hooked it up correctly. This connector here is where the touch-sensitive buttons were on the front face-plate. Now those are all well and good, but I would rather just use tacks, so let’s see if we can deduce how this works. I have taken this wire and hooked it up to ground, because that is usually how everything works. It is either ground - zero or voltage – one. So, I think this one here, yep – okay. That one is power, so if we touch a switch to that pin there and pull it ground it will turn on the unit. And I believe two over is eject, yep. Bingo. Here we have attached a wire for the buttons we are going to add later on. So we have power, eject, sync, and then ground.
So, that is how that works. Okay, I have tested them all and they are all good. So now we can move on to the next part, the hard-drive and optical-drive. This is how the DVD drive is placed in the actual unit. As you can see it has a power cord here, and then also a SATA plug. Now, we can get replacement SATA cord to extend that. But if we want to move this drive over here, we are going to have to manually make this cord longer. Now it is custom, but you can just Google X-Box DVD power connector and find the pin-out.
So basically, we just have to extend this from here to here and just wire up the connections we need. This thing contains ground, 12 volts, 5 volts, 3.3 volts, tray-status, and then another pin to make the tray open and close. The DVD cable has been extended so the drive can put on the side. Now it is time to work on the hard-drive. Alright, let’s put in the SATA hard-drive. It will go right about here. Then you have to plug it into the left hole because that is the one for the hard-drive. Oh crap, it is just barely too short. So, I am actually going to have to extend this using left-over SATA from the DVD drive.
DVD SATA is going to be right here, the one for the hard-drive has to come around like this. So, we have to make the connection here. Here are the insides of the SATA cables. There are two pair, A and B, each one has two ground on either side and the two wires in the center are the positive and minus data. You can think of it as two sets of USB connections.
What we are going to do is basically re-hook all of these back up and keep them isolated. You only need the grounds once, but it is good to make sure you have everything hooked up, just to make sure. It also helps to keep it straight and inline. The SATA connection is done. Don’t worry, I guarantee it will work. Okay, let’s see if it works. I am powering up the little screen. Wow, look at that – HD resolution. Can you believe it?”
“Ben: We are just about there with the X-Box 360 laptop. In the next episode, we will be putting it into the case, adding sound, power and finishing it. Now, let’s get back to the coach-section laptop.”
“Ben: This may look like a simple rod, but to me it is more. It is now a patented center of gravity detector. That is pretty good - I am going to mark it off as the center of gravity. Once we know where the center of gravity is, we can design the case around it. Now, there are three basic parts. There is the frame or the arm that holds the screen assembly, there is the top lid which encloses it and has a neat graphic, and then there is the front frame which actually goes around the LCD.
So, we are going to take these designs in to get CNC and then I am going to take the parts to my friend Mike’s house and we will put it together. We are back to the main build. Now as you can see here, we have routed a few pieces, it is fairly simple. We are basically making a screen frame. So we have got these two things here, which are going to give depth around the screen. Then we have some plates that will hold the screen in place. We are going to just sand the edges here so we can glue the frame to it. I always want to sand things before I glue it because it gives more surface area for the glue to stick to.
Now, we are going to use super-glue on this. Super-glue is pretty good stuff, it is cheap and it works great. Now I am doing it this way so that I can see if there is any overhang. The LCD in a laptop is kind of like the windshield in a car, it actually provides a lot of the structural strength. This is pretty flimsy obviously, so is a laptop screen area when you take the LCD out. If we make sure the LCD is held firmly to the frame, it will give the frame support rather than the frame actually giving it support because the LCD is a solid piece of glass. We are going to put the screen in place, and then we are going to glue this in place. That way we know it fits.
As you can see, it is pretty firm because the LCD is stuck to the frame, so it gives it strength. Alright, my cheap mounting method is this: the bracket is here - this thumb-screw goes through the hole and attaches the two positions of the screen using these nuts. So basically, you hand-tighten it into the nut like that. So we have to adhere these nuts somehow, so what I am going to do is glue them in place using super-glue and then reinforcing it with J-B Weld, but I have to make some surface area so the glue will stick. Oh yeah.
Alright, I am using this J-B Weld, even though this is J-B Kwik, it is just like J-B Weld – it’s just that is quick. It is a two-part epoxy, it is great. If you have never used it, you should get it. Okay, so we put these nuts in here and they will receive the thumb-screws. So what I did was super-glue kind of put them in place, now I am using J-B Kwik to keep them in place. Mike, you have to be quick with that J-B Kwik - hurry.”
“Mike: I am not that quick.”
“Ben: Oh man, time is wasting. We are coming to a problem here, the hole in the bracket doesn’t quite line up with the nut. So we can either move the hole a little bit or shave off this bracket. To make up for the misalignment, Mike has put a little tap-hole in here. Mike did the fix-work.”
“Mike: I think it worked.”
“Ben: Yes, you saved us dollars upon dollars of routing time. A useful tool when working with screws is called a tap. Basically it is a thing that you screw in and it makes the screw holes in the object for you, so when you put the screw in – it goes easily. I have forgotten my tap, so I am having to manually torque this through the piece to make the threads. Mike, this is amazing. You are screwing that easily by twisting the piece around the screw rather than twisting the screw into the piece. What is this an example of?”
“Mike: I made a crude-lever. It is one of the 7 simple machines.”
“Ben: Uh huh, so now here comes the un-cool part. As you can see, the screw goes all the way through. It is too long, so we are going to have to dremel the screw shorter. This lights up when the screen does, so I can make a free back-lit section. I need to protect this first, so I am going to go “green” and recycle. If you have something like a piece of plastic like this memory came in, it is like gold. Look at this, free plastic. Put it against this text here so these letters will stay in place. Got some spray adhesive, you don’t need much.
It is possible we may have put too much J-B Weld on, and by possible I mean we did put too much on. So I am going to shave it down so the lid fits. Alright, so we have the frame and it attaches to the laptop – these match up there, see. So now we have to bolt these together, slip the ribbon cable through the back of this, and then screw this in place. Alright, Mike is going to attach the brackets to the friction-hinges and then we will reattach the brackets to the screen portion and we should be ready to go. And now, we remove the transfer tape to reveal the fine full-wood exterior. Wood paneling, it is not just for your upbeat home of the 70’s anymore.
These knob screws we used here is obviously a design flaw, we should have used a bigger turn-key screw because you really can’t do these by hand. Once we add those, it is going to be a lot easier to do. Now if you move the screw out to this position, you can actually still use it as a regular laptop. See? So it can still open as a regular laptop, it does both things. I think what we can do in the future is we could improve how the brackets work so it is easier to slide. We just used these screws here because it was the quickest way to prove the concept. It is the dual-position, coach laptop. You can use it like a regular laptop, or it can work in airplane mode.”
“Ben: That is all the time we have for today. Be sure to catch our next episode where we will modify a bunch of rock band equipment and also finish the X-Box 360 laptop. We will see you then.”
The Ben Heck show was made possible by our sponsors at Element 14. For more information on all my projects and for a list of all the parts I used today – visit element14.com. Visit their community and the Ben Heck Show group using the URL shown below. Join me there to get more details about a chance to win the X-Box 360 laptop we are building. We will see you next time.