Broken TV brought to life in LEGO body

posted Oct 31st 2009 7:15am by Mike Szczys
filed under: home entertainment hacks

LEGO-monitor-frontbanner

After letting it sit around for about 3 years, [Blake] decided it was time to fix his broken 15″ television. A little trouble shooting showed the problem was with the inverter. The backlight would come on for a few seconds, off for a few seconds, then repeat. By freeing the Magnavox 15MF400T from its metal case he got it working again, but couldn’t find the source of the short. His solution: build a new case out of non-conductive material. Voilà! We have the 15″ LEGO monitor.

It’s not a very complicated LEGO build, but it’s the first case mod we’ve seen in a long time that isn’t strictly gratuitous. Join us after the break for more pictures. LEGO-monitor-backside

Above we see the backside of the monitor. The ladders are a nice touch.

LEGO-monitor-PCB

Here is the PCB where the video connections are made. The board appears to be free-floating. Finding a more permanent way of attaching this and perhaps building a LEGO access panel would be a nice improvement.

LEGO-monitor-case-parts

These are the left over parts of the case. If these are the only discarded parts and the rest of it is useful again, we think it’s a success.

LEGO-15-inch-monitor

Comments [21]

tagged: inverter, lego, Maxnavox, tv

Reader Comments

wow, i loved my legos when I was a kid. might have to break em out for a few projects like this.

Posted at 7:26 am on Oct 31st, 2009 by wolfy02

legos, the fun and usefull tool

Posted at 7:28 am on Oct 31st, 2009 by monkeyslayer56

anyone else finds theres something missing on the taskbar?

Posted at 7:50 am on Oct 31st, 2009 by 2ti6x

The word miserable could perfectly describe this hack…

Posted at 7:55 am on Oct 31st, 2009 by Coligny

lol Love the ladders

Posted at 8:42 am on Oct 31st, 2009 by blizzarddemon

@2ti6x:
indeed…there is no system tray, no clock, and no start button, and there is two sets of minimize/maximize buttons on that firefox window…

shopped, or a really strange copy of windows… :S

Posted at 9:44 am on Oct 31st, 2009 by Kealper

it is probably a second monitor running a program like UltraMon. It gives you a second taskbar for applications running on your second monitor and doesn’t necessarily show a clock.

Posted at 9:50 am on Oct 31st, 2009 by vsnine

Auto-hide taskbar and custom windows theme; it’s more common than you may think, especially with pirated windows discs with bonus stuff slipstreamed into them.

Posted at 10:21 am on Oct 31st, 2009 by xrazorwirex

Maybe its not windows.

Posted at 10:27 am on Oct 31st, 2009 by adamziegler

but look at Firefox top all crap there taking 1/4 of view space !

Posted at 10:36 am on Oct 31st, 2009 by therian

Thats deffinatly a secondary monitor with Ultramon. It gives you a taskbar with no start and no system tray.

It also adds 2 buttons to the top of your window that allow you to maximize the window across all screens, and the other one moves the window to the next monitor.

Posted at 10:54 am on Oct 31st, 2009 by Mike

I love the police minifigure on top. It just makes the case that much cooler. Now I just need my monitor to break the same way so I can warrant doing the same to my computer :P

Posted at 2:40 pm on Oct 31st, 2009 by Erik

OMG
Couldn’t he find a better case? For example to mount the screen on a wooden board and the PCBs behind it. But this is the most inpractical soulution I can think of and it looks gay too.
poor hackaday

Posted at 3:24 pm on Oct 31st, 2009 by Anonymous

Mike beat me to it >_< But yeah, the guys running ultramon. I've used it myself a bit but never really liked it much.

Posted at 3:46 pm on Oct 31st, 2009 by Nick

….gotta love trolls
this is 1 of the best case mods sofar
hm, speaking of case mods, has anyone made a case out of old motherboards yet?
btw, i just found a 3.2 ghz hp in the alley with a 80 gig hdd, score!

Posted at 6:43 pm on Oct 31st, 2009 by Frogz

Yeah sure, saying that using lego as makeshift casing is miserable is considered trolling… What aboot the fact that even a monkey can do better than this, the fact that a Hack is supposed to be a clever use of something, out of the box thinking or showing some skills ? A retard using lego bricks in a way that would put shame to a toddler is not a hack. It’s a tribute to mediocrity.

Posted at 3:29 am on Nov 1st, 2009 by Coligny

I was expecting a crazy lego structure with a CRT in it. As far as I’m concerned, it’s not a TV without a CRT – it’s an LCD/TFT/Plasma/LED/Laser panel.

Posted at 3:44 am on Nov 1st, 2009 by M4CGYV3R

cool would have been ripping out the (dead) backlight tubes, removing the panel and then grafting the panel into the case of a dead crt monitor, with a high wattage LED behind the panel.

even better, take the centre polarisers off the panel(s) (best to use one with scratches for this), sandwich the panels together and make a 3-D monitor.

Posted at 1:36 pm on Nov 1st, 2009 by bothersaidpooh

You wankers and you’re, “what would have been better… miasma. spare us all
Excellent way to get rid of a broken tv and some useless chinese plastic parts imo. Throw it in the kids room & call it a day. This way you can stream your propaganda direct even while they’re sleeping!

Posted at 4:54 pm on Nov 2nd, 2009 by Gabe

I can see the benefit of using legos to make a new frame. Yeah, it may be a little bulky, but if you can find a strong enough glue it will be more durable than the original plastic. Also, you can make your own designs or even set up a lighting scheme with transparent legos.

Posted at 2:38 pm on Nov 5th, 2009 by Jayson

Id like to extend a thank you to all the people who mock my creation. Hackaday wasn’t made(as far as i know) for people who think they can do better to try to prove it by telling others that their idea was stupid and that they could have done it better. I was just posting a bit about what I had done for the people who care to look at it. If you could have done it better, fine. Go do better. I used what I had available on short notice, and I am quiet proud of what I’ve done.

To clear up any questions, YES I am using Ultramon to extend my task bar to my second monitor. I didnt include my main monitor in the pictures because the article was about the rebirthed one. The difficult part of the monitor was having to use VGA ports for both monitors. Required going in and messing with the BIOs til it worked. My Version of Vista is NOT pirated in any way.

Thank you for the positive comments from the people who did post them, and to those who bash on others ideas, go play in traffic. Dont have anything nice to say, dont say anything at all

Posted at 1:32 am on Nov 20th, 2009 by Blake

Broken TV brought to life in LEGO body

Recent Posts

Reader Comments

Leave a Reply

Hacks

Resources

RSS newsfeeds

Most commented on (30 days)

Recent comments