Although generally iPads tend to keep their resale value, there are a few exceptions, such as when you find yourself burdened with iCloud-locked devices. Instead of tossing these out as e-waste, you can still give them a new, arguably better purpose in life: an external display, with touchscreen functionality if you’re persistent enough. Basically someone like [Tucker Osman], who spent the past months on making the touchscreen functionality play nice in Windows and Linux.
While newer iPads are easy enough to upcycle as an external display as they use eDP (embedded Display Port), the touch controller relies on a number of chips that normally are initialized and controlled by the CPU. Most of the time was thus spent on reverse-engineering this whole process, though rather than a full-depth reverse-engineering, instead the initialization data stream was recorded and played back.
This thus requires that the iPad can still boot into iOS, but as demonstrated in the video it’s good enough to turn iCloud-locked e-waste into a multi-touch display. The SPI data stream that would normally go to the iPad’s SoC is instead intercepted by a Raspberry Pi Pico board which pretends to be a USB HID peripheral to the PC.
If you feel like giving it a short yourself, there’s the GitHub repository with details.
Thanks to [come2] for the tip.
I’m no editor but sheesh this is tough to read.
Nah, not really. Just give it another short.
Holy crap was it ever!
Most of the time was thus spent on reverse-engineering this whole process, though rather than a full-depth reverse-engineering, instead the initialization data stream was recorded and played back.
What does this even mean? “Most of the time was spent on the touch component. Instead of fully reverse engineering each component, the initialization data stream was recorded and played back”
After getting through that the very next sentence begins with “This, thus”.
It’s wild how poorly edited the articles/posts are on HaD. Been a reader for years and years, and for some reason I’m still surprised to see so many grammatical, or even spelling, errors.
Reminds me of someone over EEVBlog replacing their Agilent scooe display with the iPad screen
If, on the other hand, you have a Mac, you can just use the iPad as a second screen wirelessly via Continuity. Won’t work on the oldest iPads, but ours is pretty old and it works. I believe the iPad just needs to be “locked” (to use the author’s pejorative term) to the same iCloud account as the Mac, and within WiFi range.
How is ‘locked’ a pejorative?
The hardware is literally locked to it.
Which is also the whole point of the mod.
Even if you have a Mac, a locked ipad cannot be used as a screen, because you aren’t ALLOWED to use it at all.
These locks should be prohibited by law.
They are so wasteful.
You want to discourage theft? Fine.
Put a statute of limitations on it.