Matthew Nguyen Capstone

The initial plan for my capstone was to upcycle my dead laptop into useful stuff. My first planned device was a passively cooled desktop PC, which is what most of my research in my bibliography points to. I’d been attempting to get the mainboard of the laptop working for about 6 months until a repair attempt ended in the magic blue smoke (ie: the components fried). I then shifted to attempting to salvage still working parts from the laptop. The final product of this salvaging is a portable desktop monitor made from the LCD from the laptop. To do that. I started by buying some board from Shenzhen in order to convert an HDMI signal to LVDS for the monitor, then got to building an enclosure for the LCD out of sheet metal and 3d printed components. With one of the goals being portability, I reused the laptop’s hinges to make a folding stand for the monitor and found a power supply with similar dimensions to the board from Shenzhen, allowing everything to fold into a tight package.