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Comment by user_7832 | Hacker News Reader

If you have the time and technical expertise of basic electronics (mainly soldering) and maybe 3d printing/basic CAD design, you can make your own monitor and that too at a decent price.

Step 1: Go to panelook.com (or directly https://www.panelook.com/modelsearch.php?op=resolution if you have a resolution in mind)

Step 2: Find the model number of your desired monitor and put it into your desired search engine (Google works)

Step 3: Buy the monitor WITH THE DRIVER* from AliExpress/Alibaba/TaoBao/eBay/wherever you get Google search results from

Step 4: Wait (???)

Step 5: Design a 3d model and print it, or use acrylic and cut it by hand, or whatever you want. Profit!

* - the display connects to the display driver. The driver is the one with an HDMI/DP/USB-C port.

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This. 3 years ago I built a 1mm thick 4K monitor by just mounting a bare panel to a thin laptop stand and hiding the eDP to DP board underneath. It was better than anything on the market and cost literally 3/4 as much as a normal fat and ugly monitor.

I’ll just add “Message several sellers and ask for a datasheet and 1pc price+shipping from each one” to Step 3.

Let's see some pics

It doesn’t look as interesting as you’d expect. In fact it looks just like any other panel lol. These days I only use it to set up new machines in the data center: https://i.imgur.com/H7kww6U_d.webp?maxwidth=1520&fidelity=gr...

My current daily driver is the XB273K (27” 4K 120hz)

Lol uh, what's the don't touch label for?

It’s for factory workers that assemble laptops. Despite the label, it’s perfectly ok to touch it. There’s a flex PCB behind the label that drives the backlight and converts the eDP signal to pixels. It’s normally protected by the laptop bezel so it’s somewhat fragile. If you bend it, you’ll break traces on the PCB or pop components off.

Maybe I'm remembering old tech, but doesn't that also have thousands of volts in it?

You are! My first laptop ~15 years ago had a super thin (1mm?) fluorescent tube below the panel where the flex PCB would be. It used thousands of volts to start the backlight.

My panel (and anything from the last decade) uses LED backlights so I would not expect anything above 60V.

Cool, do you have a way and controls to set contrast, color, brightness, temperature, etc like in factory monitors via an OSD menu?

Yep! Just about any driver board that can convert between different input formats will also have an OSD.

I’m kinda surprised people have so many questions about this. I dug up the emails. I paid $176 incl shipping/tax to zjtechhk for a B156ZAN03.4 panel, eDP cable, and a MST9U11Q1 driver board (which has DP, HDMI, and USBC inputs, eDP output, and a ribbon cable to a PCB with 4 buttons to control the OSD)

It was an awesome deal at the time, but I’m pretty sure all these components are obsolete by now.

But does it have a terrible menu system, that takes 1 button press to change the color of gaming LEDs but 10 button presses to change the input? If not, it will never compete with commercial monitors.

Lol. The default keymap is indeed fairly intuitive since it hasn’t been customized by the marketing dept yet. Power, menu, up, down, input.

The problem is precisely the selection of appropriately sized "TV quality and price" panels to make a monitor with not the lack of physical construction of such panels into monitors.

I'm not sure I understand you. Are you saying that the problem is selecting the right model out of all the available choices, or are you saying that there aren't models available at TV quality/prices?

Regarding the former, the website does have quite a few filters (though the navigation isn't the best but it works).

For the latter, yes quality can be quite a hit-and-miss when purchasing but prices are very reasonable. There may be a ~10-15% markup compared to a large-scale razor-thin margin monitor being sold at nearly a loss on Amazon, but most products are quite reasonably priced.

Re: the quality, if you're talking about advanced features you may be able to contact the distributors/manufacturers on the website selling them and ask them to make a custom order with more features (eg an extra port) for a slight price, though this varies.

The latter. As you say, finding panels that exist is easy even for a layman so it follows out of over 100 million monitors shipped per year at least one manufacturer would be using said all around vastly superior panel and you wouldn't have to DIY it.

I've used this method for repurposing laptop screens but I've never found it a significant cost saver (even ignoring time/labor) vs standard prebuilt monitors nor is anyone making such a panel exclusively for DYI-ers.

It's certainly true that for high-end displays I'd just go to Dell/LG/Samsung etc instead of AliExpress. Heck, anything that's premium enough to cover beyond sRGB is likely to be rare on Ali. But (imo) the biggest benefits of low price and easy accessibility to the low-mid end of products is the benefit.

Not saying that you can't get those 8k panels LG uses - but - sending 4k USD to someone over AliExpress feels quite risky even to me. You could probably get good stuff if you put in the effort but if you're earnings decent money from your CS job (I suppose most here are, I'm still a student) then it'll probably be easier to buy OEM/brand name.

here's a video a youtuber showing how to do it, in case someone want a visual example. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrqdHVeBkp4

They're usually called scaler boards, not drivers. Ones with LVDS outputs are common, but a lot of the new panels use VbyOne which seems to be rarer and more expensive to find a scaler for.

Thanks for sharing panelook; just spent 30 minutes browsing around. I love niche sites like this!

Thanks, I'm happy when I can share bits of trivia like this ^^

I've been going crazy and frustrated with the lack of HiDPI monitors on the market which can do integer scaling (27 inch 5K, 32 inch 8K) and here's a website that lists panels for such monitors.

I have no idea how to go about making a custom monitor but if it's feasible to solve my problem, I'm willing to learn.

So let's say I want to buy the LM270QQ1-SDA2, should I order that panel from an e-commerce website? Or should I find a monitor with that specific panel? Why is 3d printing needed here? Any article or detailed guide you can point me to?

I’d recommend buying the panel, eDP cable, and driver board from the same seller. I posted my experience doing the same above. Of course you could take a chance with random components and it’ll probably work as long as the connectors match, but why bother when Chinese vendors are willing to do the legwork for you?

You don’t need a 3D printer if you have another way to hold the panel (I glued it to a thin laptop stand)

Got it, so I should get the panel, the driver, and an eDP cable (to connect the driver and the panel?) from a single seller.

I assume that the use of 3D printer was mentioned to build an enclosure for the panel, like for using a VESA mount?

Yes exactly. You need something to attach the panel to (unless you've got magic to float it in mid air lol). You can repurpose an old canvas/acrylic board, or go fancy with a custom 3d printed case.

Thing is, you could glue the panel to something as people have done. I find that detestable because you can't remove the panel non-distructably. A proper enclosure can hold the panel instead of sticking to it.

Sounds like it could be a good business. Custom monitors, no Alexa or spyware. Choose the specs you care about.

Quite a sign of the times when "no spyware" is now a valuable and rare differentiator.

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