Old Phone Upcycled Into Pico Projector, ASMR

To update an old saying for the modern day, one man’s e-waste is another man’s bill of materials. Upcycling has always been in the hacker’s toolkit, and cellphones provide a wealth of resources for those bold enough to seize them. [Huy Vector] was bold enough, and transformed an old smartphone into a portable pico projector and an ASMR-style video. That’s what we call efficiency!

Kidding aside, the speech-free video embedded below absolutely gives enough info to copy along with [Huy Vector] even though he doesn’t say a word the whole time. You’ll need deft hands and a phone you really don’t care about, because one of the early steps is pulling the LCD apart to remove the back layers to shine an LED through. You’ll absolutely need an old phone for that, since that trick doesn’t apply to the OLED displays that most flagships have been rocking the past few years.

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Using Cell Phone Screens With Any HDMI Interface

Thanks to the worldwide proliferation of smartphones, tiny high-resolution displays are common and cheap. Interfacing these displays with anything besides a phone has been a problem. [twl] has a board that does just that, converting HDMI to something these displays can understand, and providing a framebuffer so these displays can be written to through small microcontrollers.

[twl] is using a rather large FPGA to handle all the conversion from HDMI to the DSI the display understands. He’s using an Xilinx Spartan-6-SLX9, one of the most hobbyist friendly devices that is able to be hand soldered. Also on the board is a little bit of SDRAM for a framebuffer, HDMI input, and a power supply for the LCD and its backlight.

On the things [twl] has in his ‘to-do’ list, porting Doom to run on a cellphone display is obviously right at the top. He also wants to test the drawing commands for the Arduino side of his board, allowing any board with the suffix ~’ino to paint graphics and text on small, cheap, high-resolution displays. That’s a capability that just doesn’t exist with products twice [twl]’s projected BOM, and we can’t wait to see what he comes up with.

You can check out the demo video of [twl]’s board displaying the output of a Raspberry Pi below. If you look very closely, you’ll notice the boot/default screen for the display adapter is the Hackaday Jolly Wrencher.

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