I found a ProView LCD monitor in the trash. At the time, I figured I could use it together with my laptop to create a dual monitor setup. When I powered up the monitor it wouldn’t power up, and even if it did power up someone who threw away the LCD monitor foolishly cut off the VGA cable. I see that quite a bit, whats the point in cutting the cable off? Just toss it if you’re going to toss it. That didn’t stop me, here’s what I did.
I immediately split apart the LCD monitor to pieces. Bottom right is the LCD screen showing cables for the back-lit display, and the left ones carries all the color information.
Left side shows the mainboard and the power supply.
Power supply board. Bottom right showing combusted electrolytic capacitors. Top of the board are the inverter circuits for the back-lit display. Left side shows 120V in, various coils, a diode bridge, probably a bleeder resister, step down transformer…
I decided to replace all these capacitors. One probably failed and it probably set a chain reaction and screwed them all up. They have cuts on the top so that they break open to release pressure if they fail. Top 4 all busted open. The bottom ones are bulging.
Aerial view.
Close up of the bad capacitors with voltage regulators in the background.
New VGA cable, (6) 470μF electrolytic capacitors. I got one rated at 35 volts and the rest rated at 25 volts. Originally all rated at 25 volts, but I thought the really bad one may have encountered higher voltages or whatever. The smaller capacitor is a 220μF rated at 25v.
Bottom side of the printed circuit board. I desoldered C216, C214, C213, C212, C211, C215, and C222
Random picture from the inverter section.
Power Supply board with the capacitors removed.
Power Supply board with the capacitors removed. Bottom one I didn’t remove yet. Left side shows a header connector which plugs into the main board to power it. This is the power supplies output providing 5 and 14 volts and some other pins to help the thing switch to power saving mode and stuff.
New capacitor placed through the holes ready to be soldered.
One pin soldered.
Messed up capacitor versus the new replacement.
Comes in a smaller package and a nice green color, haha. The pins are too long, so I snip them before it gets soldered to the board.
All the solder joints done!
Capacitors replaced!
Capacitors replaced! Looks nice with the green color instead of black.
WOW, I got it to power up!
Message says no signal, because the guy that threw away the LCD monitor, stupid guy cut off the VGA cable, I don’t know why. Probably thought the monitor was garbage since it wouldn’t power, but I got it to power. So now I have to attach a new cable.
My glass table, top are the packaging from the capacitors. Left are the capacitors. Center are snipped pins from the new capacitors and right shows splatters of solder.
Messed up capacitors. Bottom right you can see it was bulging from the bottom.
Stripped the outer sheath and the shielding of the new VGA cable. I cut off the female connector since I didn’t need it.
Old half of the VGA cable.
Stripped the wires. Stupid thing doesn’t match up. None of the colors of the old cable match up to the new one. How stupid, it was incredibly difficult to get this part to work when it shouldn’t have been broken in the first place.
My testing setup. I used a sharpie to hold up the LCD. LCD cable, and inverter cables are attached, and VGA cable goes to the mainboard, and other end to the computer. Then I splice the wires together and test. Bottom right shows the power cable and the button panel for the LCD.
Started to research that chip, the TSU16AK.
Removed the barcode sticker to desolder the quartz oscillator.
Tried to count the pins to see which is which it goes counter-clockwise starting from pin one indicated by the indented dot on the chip. Pins are incremented by 5 separated by small white dots and markings on the PCB.
Quartz oscillator was in the way, I wanted to follow the traces. Ultimate goal is to figure out which wire to splice with which wire for the VGA cables because the stupid colors don’t correspond.
I looked up the chip online by using a google trick to search for the datasheet. Datasheets and schematics are often in PDF format so I googled: TSU16AK filetype:pdf. I found a service manual with schematics and pinouts of the TSU16AK. This manual was meant for an Acer LCD monitor but the circuitry was very similar and useful. Thank god for copy cats.
Using a continuity tester and the Pinouts for a male VGA connector I know which pin goes to what for the new cable. But the old cable I didn’t know which pin was for horizontal and vertical sync. So my genius idea was to follow the circuits. From this pinout diagram we see that Pin 37 is for Horizontal Sync and Pin 38 is for Vertical Sync on the TSU16AK chip.
Quartz oscillator removed and desoldered. so we can follow the circuits better. Top chip is the TSU16AK the last circle is Pin 35, previous mark would be Pin 30, etc. So the second to last pin is pin 37 which I identified as the Horizontal Sync. So what I did now is follow the circuitry. Its super small and difficult, but the photos blown up helps. You can see it goes through a surface mount resistor R17 then goes further down…
…it then splits off to go under that diode (D3), and then goes to that surface mount resister R24. From there I used a continuity tester to see which pin it was on the above connector. I quickly got to know it was the white wire. Did the same for Vertical sync. Turns out there is similar circuitry and it connects to the neighboring diode and resistor R23.
Another view.
Tested it and it worked! Genius.
The final test splice. The bottom unconnected wires are kind of useless. Grey one is unconnected, and the other ones are like ID pins and stuff. In old monitors depending on the combination of which is connected to ground, a computer can determine if a monitor is capable of supporting 1024×768 or whatever.
I set up a dual monitor setup, plus I have my other laptop I use for testing and stuff. Main laptop uses 1920×1200 and then the new monitor is 1280×1024 additional screen area.
Some quick notes.
Notes on my whiteboard. Left is the cable, right is from the monitor.
Schematic from online plus some notes.
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You are a true bellend my friend