Portable Monitor Extension For Nintendo Switch

A 12" LCD screen sits between speakers (on lower half of bezel) and joycon controllers are attached on the upper half of the bezel.

Handheld consoles are always a tradeoff between portability and screen real estate. [Pavlo Khmel] felt that the Nintendo Switch erred too much on the side of portability, and built an extension to embiggen his Switch. (YouTube)

[Khmel] repurposed a Dell XPS 12 LCD panel for the heart of this hack and attached it to an LCD controller board to serve as an external monitor for the Switch. A 3D printed enclosure envelops the screen and also contains a battery, speakers, and a dock for the console. Along the top edges, metal rails let you slide in the official Joy-Cons or any number of third party controllers, even those that require a power connection from the Switch.

Since the Switch sees this as being docked, it allows the console to run faster and at higher resolution than if it were in handheld mode. The extension lasts about 5 hours on battery power, and the Switch inside will still be fully charged if you don’t mind being constrained to its small screen while you charge it’s bigger-screened exoskeleton.

Need more portable goodness? Be sure to check out our other handheld and Nintendo Switch hacks.

7 thoughts on “Portable Monitor Extension For Nintendo Switch

    1. A little harsh, as the switch might be rather low spec but its still very capable of good visuals, and at least some games do have good visuals even when running on the bigger screen.

      Its no Steamdeck type gaming centric PC with fairly high end modern GPU element in handheld formfactor, so you’d not get me choosing to pay the Big N so very much for games that are often rather old, and have to be graphically detuned from their best version – even if it still looks fine. As now I have a much more potent portable. But still a switch isn’t that bad, if another exclusive game I want comes out for it I’d be tempted, as if the game is interesting its interesting and if developer bothered to make a pretty game, its pretty – Somthing no amount of potent hardware can change is if the dev’s decided low poly, low effort graphics was all they wanted.

      1. Between first party titles and indies, there are plenty of great games that make the Switch worthwhile. I probably spend more time playing my Switch than either my PS5 or my 3070 Ti powered gaming PC.

    2. Lol 🤣.. How wrong is this comment?
      I play switch games on my PC, but I stopped gaming on my PC. I absolutely hate the COD style games that hold your hand and come with stupid handicaps. COD started the stupid unlimited health for people who hide, COD started the spamming with no team killing, cod started the stupid things that stop making games fun. Camping used to be frowned upon, not it’s mandatory, spamming used to be frowned upon, now it’s mandatory. But all this stupid games have them….What a bunch of pussycats, learn to ▶️ games the right way.

    3. Got to agree with everyone else who replied to the OP comment. I literally am stuck on playing Hades for the Switch as one example, and I love it just as much in hand-held mode as I do docked. I play the Switch more than the Xbox lately. Graphic quality can of course be limited by hardware, but if the game dev decides to put in extreme effort on visuals and graphics as much as storylines and gameplay much like Supergiant did, the Switch is just as enjoyable as other consoles of not more for the sheer joy of portability

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