Dangerous Prototypes

Thought I might transfer my post from hackaday here, as I would much rather support these forums and dangerous prototypes than hackaday, not to mention I would like to keep this information available for people to view. If this counts as cross posting or anything like that please tell me and I will immediately get rid of it.


I found this old Bravia in the garbage a block from my house on the way to school one morning, so off course, me being me, I decided to be late for my Spanish class by 10 minutes to drag this monster back to my house.

It was out in the rain for a few hours, and the power cord was cut. It seemed to be working fine when I got it out of the garbage, but when I attached a power cable to it, the LCD itself was cracked in two spots, looked like someone threw two wiimotes at once at it. :P

Anyways, since the LCD itself was cracked, I decided to see what was in it through the means of tearing it down. I don't have too much pictures because my camera was almost dead, so I will show you what I have so far. Under each picture is a link to the original, in case anyone wants to see the full resolution picture. The reason for hosting it on my own website is because I do not want to use any other image hosts, also because I just got a web hosting thing from hostable.com for only a dollar for three years, this is a way of testing it.

The back light of the TV, it is a large amount of ( I think?) CCFL tubes, correct me if I am wrong. :P They seem to be very sturdy on the left side, but loose on the right side, I think it is because the only way the tubes are attached on the right side is to the high voltage CCFL connectors.

http://8486.a.hostable.me/pictures/BRAVIA/DSC_0179.JPG (http://8486.a.hostable.me/pictures/BRAVIA/DSC_0179.JPG)



This is the high voltage CCFL board.
You can actually see the connectors to the CCFL tubes, and it seems to only separate the electricity into 16 paths (One per CCFL tube). There are two connectors for the high voltage from the transformer on the power board, but only one of them is actually used, I don't know why they would use up money for the 2nd connector if they are not using it, but oh well, another free connector. :P
TOP

http://8486.a.hostable.me/pictures/BRAVIA/DSC_0184.JPG (http://8486.a.hostable.me/pictures/BRAVIA/DSC_0184.JPG)
Bottom

http://8486.a.hostable.me/pictures/BRAVIA/DSC_0189.JPG (http://8486.a.hostable.me/pictures/BRAVIA/DSC_0189.JPG)



This is the board that has two very thin cables connecting it to the LCD itself (TOP), and a single connector to the main logic board (bottom). A quick look at it shows a RAM chip (on the right, rectangular IC), and a main processing chip in the middle. The reasoning for it being a ram chip is the traces are squiggly, which is to make the timing per trace as equal as possible to the other traces to the RAM chip. You can find traces like this on your RAM sticks and on your motherboards. I did not find any information on the main chip, but I am guessing it is some sort of chip that takes in data from the logic board, and spits out signals for the Horizontal and Vertical parts of the board?
TOP

http://8486.a.hostable.me/pictures/BRAVIA/DSC_0198.JPG (http://8486.a.hostable.me/pictures/BRAVIA/DSC_0198.JPG)
BOTTOM

http://8486.a.hostable.me/pictures/BRAVIA/DSC_0199.JPG (http://8486.a.hostable.me/pictures/BRAVIA/DSC_0199.JPG)
BOTTOM HI RES SCAN
http://8486.a.hostable.me/pictures/BRAVIA/PCBSCAN_1.jpg (http://8486.a.hostable.me/pictures/BRAVIA/PCBSCAN_1.jpg)



Now is the actual image stuff! On the top there was a LCD, and a black piece of plastic on the edges of the entire unit. I took out the LCD first, and here is how it looks :P It is cracked so I did not bother handling it carefully or anything, just laid it down on my desk to take a picture. I think it is the heaviest component of the TV, excluding the metal frame of the TV. It is quite thin, and very fragile, if you are moving this and you want the LCD to work, be sure to NEVER pick it up with the faces going up or down, always lift it on its side so you do not crack the lcd under its own weight.


http://8486.a.hostable.me/pictures/BRAVIA/DSC_0215.JPG (http://8486.a.hostable.me/pictures/BRAVIA/DSC_0215.JPG)



One of the cracks on the LCD. Very hard to get the camera to focus on the crack and not on the reflection. :P What I did for this was get the camera to focus on the PCB (Half press) and then pointed the camera a bit to the right so it will get the right lighting for seeing the crack on the LCD and took the picture (Full press)

http://8486.a.hostable.me/pictures/BRAVIA/DSC_0237.JPG (http://8486.a.hostable.me/pictures/BRAVIA/DSC_0237.JPG)



This is the entire back light put back together without the LCD itself. You can see the black plastic frame around it to keep everything together.

http://8486.a.hostable.me/pictures/BRAVIA/DSC_0245.JPG (http://8486.a.hostable.me/pictures/BRAVIA/DSC_0245.JPG)



The back light has a few layers on it, as do all the LCD displays I gutted as well. This one has four layers specifically, so here they are.

http://8486.a.hostable.me/pictures/BRAVIA/DSC_0204.JPG (http://8486.a.hostable.me/pictures/BRAVIA/DSC_0204.JPG)



As you can see, the first (top layer) is the thickest. It seems to have the texture similar to certain cheap plastic shower walls. It is a bit thick, not too flexible, and one side is less reflective than the other.

http://8486.a.hostable.me/pictures/BRAVIA/DSC_0205.JPG (http://8486.a.hostable.me/pictures/BRAVIA/DSC_0205.JPG)

You can actually see all the small ridges. I do not know what purpose the ridges serve, so I cannot comment on that.

http://8486.a.hostable.me/pictures/BRAVIA/DSC_0206.JPG (http://8486.a.hostable.me/pictures/BRAVIA/DSC_0206.JPG)



Here are the three layers under the top layers. They are a little heavy, and seem to be as thick as transparent sheets for projectors, if not a bit thicker.

http://8486.a.hostable.me/pictures/BRAVIA/DSC_0209.JPG (http://8486.a.hostable.me/pictures/BRAVIA/DSC_0209.JPG)



That is it for all the pictures I have :P I will have more pictures up, and will scan the thin boards with my scanner to give you all some more high res shots of the PCB's.
I intend to use the back light thing as a very well light desk surface so I can see through PCB's easily, or using it as a very big even lamp for my desk, with uniform lighting, but I am not sure which I will do. Another thing that I intend to do with this is to poke around in the main logic board, as I have heard that these things run some form of Linux.

Thanks for making it through all my horrible writing and meh pictures, I hope they were a good use of your time :P Keep in mind, I may have made mistakes, most probably did actually, so please correct me when you find any.

You posts are always welcome here, thanks for the support :)

Oh gosh, I just realized, my bold sentence makes no sense. I am mobile now so I can't edit it, but I will fix it tomorrow morning. :-P

I wrote that I am moving post to dangerous prototypes because I would much rather support these forums and hackaday than dangerous prototypes, woops. I meant to say that I would much rather support dangerous prototypes ad its forums rather than hackaday. Hopefully that caused no angry confusion, heh.

Thanks Ian, this forum is a gold mine of awesome dedicated people with really cool projects, I wouldn't want to be anywhere else :-P

No worries, I didn't even notice :) I read it the way I wanted, lol ;)

eye of the Beholder and all that :D

I would say the ridges (and the layer stack in general) are for diffusion purposes.

AAh ...more geek porn :) Very nice !

[quote author="brian"]I would say the ridges (and the layer stack in general) are for diffusion purposes.[/quote]

They are, and there's a reason for the three sheets.  Two are polarizer films orthogonal to eachother, and the third is a diffuser.  I've done a lot of messing around with LCD displays myself, and it turns out 3m has a good explanation of the optics of LCDs if anyone's interested here (http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/e ... optics101/ (http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/Vikuiti1/BrandProducts/secondary/optics101/)).

[quote author="colin.i"] I've done a lot of messing around with LCD displays myself, and it turns out 3m has a good explanation of the optics of LCDs if anyone's interested here (http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/e (http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/e) ... optics101/).[/quote]

That's probably one of the best explanations I've seen. Thanks!