Ok so i have spent the last few weeks diligently building my projector starting with an HP-A305 Solar Deluxe overhead (which is an awesome, bright bulb but lots of extra stuff that makes construction a wee bit difficult). I'm not sure what brand the lcd is but my buddy (Sbisdabomb/Eric here on diy) bought a lot of 5 of these lcd's and I bought one off of him. If you check out his thread on his projector, you can see the lcd works like a champ so no worries about that. But anyway, I had everything installed and ready to go. I fire the thing up w/o the lcd hooked up to the computer and I get a beautifuly clear blue screen indicating that nothing is hooked up and the lcd is going to power down in 8 seconds. Everything is looking good up to this point. So I grab my computer and my cable and I first plug the cable into the lcd logic and "action" starts happening on the screen. What I mean by this is streaks of blue and red and stuff start going down the screen and such. I didn't think much of it so I pluged the other end into my computer and fired it up. The screen just went crazy resembling something of "snow" on a television but a bit more vibrant than that (more colorful). Well the computer was now booted up and still this crappy snow... so i was rather discouraged thinking I have to tweak w/ some setting but I found out it's a little worse than that... I unplug the cable from the lcd and power it down... wait a few... then power it up again and now I get no blue screen... just a bunch of garbage varying from an initial flat black fading out to nothing or quick bursts of streaking colors (usually verticle). So I don't know if when I plugged in the cable there was some sort of electrostatic shock sent across my logic frying something... or if it's something else. If anyone has any suggestions I would greatly appreciate it.
If you can come up with another controller you may be in luck. The LCD itself isn't so sensitive to ESD. At the local LCD service facility, the packaging for new PCBs is VERY anti-static oriented... at least one layer of anti-static, one dissipative, sometimes another anti-static. Grounding yourself is important!
Get or make an static-dissipating wrist strap at least.
Get or make an static-dissipating wrist strap at least.
Yeah i've got to look around for more control logic. Like I said my old roomy has the exact same one so when he gets back for the fall i'll hook up his logic to my lcd to make sure everything is cool there. If it is the logic, however, it will be quite a task to find that exact setup because they aren't a typical brand you get at Best Buy. And yea, I definitely should have grounded myself but I guess I wasn't too worried because I haven't had problems in the past... live and learn I suppose. Anyway, thanks for the suggestions guys. I appreciate it.
I think everyone has to kill some expensive kit before we realize that ESD is *really* a real problem. A co-worker and I burned about a thousand dollars or so of circuit boards and a LOT of customer good-will because we are used to most of our stuff being bulletproof... and this one product family (we know now) FORCES proper ESD precautions.
Next time...
Next time...
Yeah I double, triple, and quadruple checked all cables and all have a good connection. I also checked all solder joints between the top and bottom logic on the lcd itself and they were all good still as well. I had one pop off on me before but all it did was cause a big blank strip running across the screen, everything else was fine. Then once I soldered it back, all was great again... now I don't even get a partial picture... just junk.
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