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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

The fact that it's for a CRT is the surprising part, but "universal" replacement boards for LCD TVs have been available for a while too. Here's a rare review of one, on a site that has sadly disappeared within only a few years:

http://web.archive.org/web/20190511065920/http://redlightgre...

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Here are some more links on those controllers and various LCD data:

https://www.mattmillman.com/info/lcd/rovatools/#comment-8933...

https://sites.google.com/site/lcd4hobby/home

https://github.com/ghent360/RTD-2660-Programmer/

http://openrtd2662.ru/

https://www.codeforge.com/article/258602

https://hackaday.io/project/179868-all-about-laptop-display-...

https://www.panelook.com/index.php

https://lcdtech.info/en/

https://repairalltv.com/main-board-universal-ds-d3663lua-a8-...

Thank you. You're downvoted, but I always really appreciate link dumps like these as a kick-off point for my own research.

Edit: here's one of my own! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33359963

Wow. Who knew such things existed? Fantastic. I'd hate to resolder that data cable from the LCD though.

That board was cheap as hell, had every input and decodes MP4 video. WTF.

I guess that one reviewer either didn't bother to order one with the right connector, or received it with the wrong one, but the pinouts are usually very standardised so there's no need to resolder the LVDS cable.

There's lots of videos on YouTube about these boards; unfortunately the vast majority seem to be in Indian or some other Asian country's language (despite English titles and descriptions). Here's one of the few English ones I could find: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2YTL25iyHU

Another (unvoiced, English text descriptions) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kM8_kJENdoQ

China is paradoxically filled with brilliant engineers making genius products, and mediocre engineers making products whose listings appear to be genius.

I fucking love gambling on AliExpress.

That's a great observation. I've bought stuff there that I could not even believe was as cheap as it was, I thought the price must be a typo and for sure it'll be adjusted. For electronics the pricing tends to be lower than the BOM at maximum volume discount when sourced from a large Western supplier.

And the vast majority of it just works, though I've had one or two duds.

But you need to be sharp when it comes to things that plug into a wall socket, open them up to inspect that they are safe.

I think electronics are just super cheap to make and they're overpriced when sold abroad.

Electronics are crazy. Depending on the amount of skill and/or effort you have available, there is an enormous spread of possible implementations at different price points.

For instance, I develop a product that we sell for $2500. When the company brought me in, the raw cost of the electronics was about $250. Right now I've got it down to $50, and I expect it to fall to $20 or $30 once we start producing at scale.

You’d want to hope your margins are that good distributing and marketing physical products. Gets expensive particularly if you’re retailing it and the retailer chain wants your margins for the honor of distributing with them!

I think we can describe that as just being filled with lots of engineers

Fair.

I bought one to repurpose an old laptop screen, if the screen uses a releasable connector, you can probably find a board that connects to it

Looks like machine translation from Russian original: https://mysku.club/blog/aliexpress/67872.html

Thanks for finding the original, and I did suspect it was translated from Russian due to the odd phrasing, but if it weren't for that site translating a copy and Google subsequently finding it, such interesting things might've never gotten discovered. As I mentioned in the other comment here, there's lots of videos on YouTube about these boards too, but barely any in English.

Thanks for sharing that link - it’s quite a thorough write up! I wish there were things of like quality for CarPlay retrofits.

I wish there were things of like quality for CarPlay retrofits.

Porsche Classic is all I can think of ( https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a42571042/porsche-touchscr... ). Hopefully other manufacturers will get on board with that idea at some point.

Oh there are a ton of interposer boards you can buy shipped direct from China that add CarPlay to an existing oem head unit the same way you can get reverse camera support (high jacking the video output when a certain but is pressed or the gear shift changes). It’s just that they all have massive quirks. I’ve seen the Porsche Classic CarPlay retrofit and it’s absolutely the best, but these third party solutions are available for most makes and models but all have to a of quirks and idiosyncrasies that are never presented up front.

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