• Let's the work begin

    Dominic Emond-Belanger • 04/25/2021 at 16:35 • 1 comment

    First thing to do now is to test fit everything. The first clearance issue I found is that the small PCB use to connect to the LCD panel is interfering with the right portion of the battery so I had to remove the battery first. I would like to add it back later instead to rely on a external battery bank to power the monitor.

    After cutting myself on the broken glass when removing the battery it was time to remove all the broken glass on the edges.. Using a heat gun or hot air rework station to ease the adessive, I was able to use a small flat head screw driver to clean the edges.

    Now that I can work without the risk of cutting myself again, I test fitted the driver board and luckily the thickness was perfect to not interfere with the screen!

    The next step will be to desolder the HDMI port and make a extension to bring the port to the side of the tablet.

  • Parts recieved!

    Dominic Emond-Belanger • 04/25/2021 at 15:27 • 0 comments

    I finally received all the parts needed for this project ! First thing was to test the LCD driver board and the screen and test it with with my Surface Pro 5 to make sur that I can push the full resolution to the external monitor.

    My first problem was that the external monitor was not detected at all with a Mini-DP cable so I tried with a HDMI cable by using a little Surface Pro 5 dock that plug in the Mini-DP and USB connector on the side of the Surface and give me 3 USB 3.0 and a full size HDMI port. I was able to make it work with no problem with the HDMI cable but was limited to 1080p...  I confirmed that the dock can let me push up to 4K via the HDMI but Windows think that the monitor is not capable to support more than 1080p...

    After thinking and looking on google for a while I discovers this guide to update your graphic card driver and force the graphic card to push a higher resolution to your external monitor via the Intel Graphics Command Center. After installing the most recent Intel Iris graphic driver I added the custom resolution and it worked perfectly! Here's the settings I used :

    • Timing Standard : CEA-861
    • Resolution width : 2736
    • Resolution height : 1824 
    • Refresh rate : 30Hz 
    • Underscan : 0%

    Now that I know everything is working, next step will be to prepare the Surface Pro 4 chassis and test fit the components. 

  • LCD driver board for the Surface Screen

    Dominic Emond-Belanger • 04/24/2021 at 17:48 • 1 comment

    First of all I need to buy a LCD driver board for my Surface, the part number for the screen is LTL123YL01-007 made by Samsung. I look around and found this board on Ebay.

    This driver board is power by a Realtek RTD2795 that can drive a LCD up to 4K so it should drive the 2K Surface screen with no issue. 

    The board features are :

    • Tow HDMI and one mini-DP input
    • 3.5mm jack audio output or internal speaker via the onboard audio amp. Nice!
    • Seem to have a battery charging circuit but no mention on the listing...
    • Can be powered from 5v to 12v via the barrel jack or micro USB.

    Note that there is a smaller board connecting between the LCD panel and the FPC ribbon cable, this board is use for the LED backlight driver and convert physical connector to match the one on the LCD panel.

    After ordering the LCD driver board, I found and ordered this Surface Pro 4 chassis on Ebay.

    It came with the battery, maybe I can found a way to reuse it to power the screen later, it would be a nice feature.