10.1 Touchscreen

[Outlaw]

I found resistive touch panels on ebay for 75bucks and capacitive touch panels for 250 on mouser. Is there a vendor I may have missed?

I would prefer the capacitive but 250 for just the overlay seems pretty steep. The last resistive I used I didn't care for because it seemed like the overlay was going to come off because of the spacing between the layers. Unless it was just a cheaper overlay and they aren't normally like that?

Thanks,
Outlaw

[Fuganater]

I have been looking at them on Amazon. You can get one for under $200 but I think they were 7" screens.

[Outlaw]

Yeah, mouser had a 7" for 158, the 10.1 seems to be a huge price hike.

Thanks.

Any opinions on resistive?

[Konrad]

Resistive grids were the first touchscreen technology. Capacitive is newer and quickly replaced resistive because it allowed multiple simultaneous contact points, and methods to sense "pressure", and because iApple ordered millions and millions of units. Subsequent advances in technology have of course focussed almost exclusively on capacitive systems ... resistive stuff tends to only be made/used where low cost is the first priority.

I used to do a lot of business with LCD123 guys from Alibaba. They probably don't exist anymore, but there's always plenty of no-name one-man "import/export" companies specializing in display panels and similar commodities. They spamvertise themselves around places like laptop forums. Be sure to specify you want (and will pay $5 premium on) an "A+" screen binned for maximum brightness and no dead/swimmy pixels or other manufacturing defects etc etc. A single piece order for an A+ 10.1" capacitive touchgrid TFT LCM should cost about US$100-125 (plus ~$25 and several days to ship to North America), depending on model particulars. That's complete display panel with factory integrated touchgrid, as used by the laptop ODMs. Order straight from the middlemen who supply the factories!

Displays used in mobile devices tend to be a lot like CRTs used to be in olden times, they come in standardized sizes and specs and are in reality all manufactured at a small number of physical plants. Which laptop brand/model? (Please don't say it's an Acer, those ain't worth upgrading.)

[Outlaw]

Thanks for the info. From what I have seen online with the previous research for my laptop, Alibaba does exist but I wasn't sure of them so I just stayed away. A lot of the stuff I found on sites like that too had minimum orders.

This is for an HP Mini 1030nr. I was looking to throw droid OS on it and maybe use as a tablet. It's specs would outperform most low-middle grade tablets but finding a suitable overlay seems to make it not cost effective. I would have to spend a whole ~12 bucks to get wifi support through droidx86 though as they have only done the asus eee which uses a different wifi card.

Droid 4.0 seems to work very well minus the wifi setback though. Just have to use mouse/keyboard for input though.

[Konrad]

Alibaba is not a company, it's a trade directory. It's where all those no-name manufacturing companies in Asia sort of advertise, announce, and auction their services/products ... you might, for example, see Quanta (laptop manufacturer) on Alibaba, and they'll buy their keyboards from Chicony on Alibaba, their screens from Sharp on Alibaba, their WiFi components from Marvell on Alibaba ... except none of them actually operate under their brand identities, it's all hordes of procurement officers (and middlemen) trying to buy and sell and trade surplus inventories at the best price they can get. They usually play orders in bulk (like, 10K units minimum) but many will happily sell 1-10 pieces at "outrageous" prices like those I quoted above.

I can't find the actual part number (and thus, specifications) for the display in an HP Mini 1030nr. It will of course be on a label on the mylar/aluminum chassis backing of the screen itself ... have you already taken it apart by any chance?

[Outlaw]

Have only pulled apart under the keyboard to verify it was in fact a broadcom wifi card which is a known issue with droidx86. I have not pulled the display apart.

I'll have a look see on the site.

[Konrad]

A little off topic, but you might find this link helpful in disassembly. Beware that HP is notorious for using very short and very fragile data ribbons to interconnect boards, these must always be disconnected with utmost care (by opening barely accessible hidden little lockbar levers) before lifting any PCBs out, otherwise the ribbons tear very easily - and they are nearly impossible to repair or replace.

You also might find this link (about Eee hardware mods) interesting. Particularly, the idea of cutting/bypassing the solder traces for one of the mobo USB connectors and feeding them into an internally-mounted USB hub; then wiring one port back out to the original USB connector while using the other 1-3 ports to plug in other internally-mounted devices like WiFi/WLAN, BT, or GPS devices. It depends a lot on how much free space you can find inside your beast, there's not a lot of room; plus it's only useful if you can get (USB) software support/drivers for those devices to run on your OS.

I found quite a few links about modding the BIOS/ASICS firmware on your device. Probably best if you find such things yourself, since HP devices are also notoriously difficult when it comes to modding the firmware, bootloaders, etc. HP sometimes tries awfully hard to emulate Apple, at least insofar as being proprietary dickheads.

[Outlaw]

Thanks for the HP link but I have already had the "joys" hahaha of taking a few HP's apart including the Mini. I have also had to replace the quick play ribbons on the DV6000. lol I just didn't fully take the screen apart on the Mini.

The Eee link looks pretty interesting. I could see doing the hw mod but I wont touch the bios trying to do self mods. lol. It would be nice having more then 2 usb ports available. The only "open space" is by the hard drive. Could probably get a stripped down flashdrive in there for a cheaper storage solution.

Thanks for the help so far! Have to read the entire article now.
Outlaw


*update*
Good read and lots of modding there. Some of it I won't be doing, lol. BUT I could definitely use it and hopefully plan this since like the Hydro6000 build, it will have to wait til next month/tax returns but give me plenty of time to work out placements and such.