Digital Arts Final Installation

 I regard the iMac G4 as the most beautiful personal computer ever produced. I thought it tragic that such a work of art should slip into obsolescence and set out to revitalize it with modern technology.  My goal was to create a fully functional, modern computer completely within the confines of the original iMac all-in-one concept; everything contained within the unaltered body. Functional data ports, single power cable, etc.

Because of the limited room inside the computer, Apple didn’t use off-the-shelf components. Almost everything (including the display) was custom made to work with only those components. The culmination of four months of research, experimentation, and error, the most difficult part of this transformation, the display, was finally completed. The display can now be attached to any modern computer via a DVI cable. 

To complete this project, I constructed a custom power supply and completely rewired the display. To do this, I taught myself the finer points of power supplies, the inner workings of displays, LVDS and TMDS video signals, high voltage CCFL backlights, and spent a lot of time troubleshooting obscure electrical issues to which nobody seems to know the answers. 

Although the project was completed for a Digital Arts class, this is a personal project I first began thinking about after the iMac G4‘s discontinuation. I kept a blog of the entire process here. 

Final video displayed on computer during installation: 

Display: Complete

Well, after making the problem substantially worse, I ended up getting everything working perfectly! It turns out I did have a few of the polarities switched on the TDMS Data lines. That's what I get for trying to do this sort of thing at 1am. Anyway, everything seems to be working perfectly now!

So now, on to the Mac Mini part of this... sorta. I don't know when I'm going to actually get around to spending the $600 on a new mini for a computer I'm probably not going to use that often. Needless to say, I still want to do it, and if nothing else, I can use this as an external display for my laptop (when I'm not using my 20" Cinema Display?)

So Close!

So I replaced the black cord, cutting it right before it gets to the connector going into the LCD display. I had quite a hard time getting the 4 groups of wires needed for the 17" through the neck, but after an hour or so, managed to pull it off.

Once I got everything wired back up, I hooked it all up and turned it on. The good news is, no weird signal interference. The bad news is,  I think I mixed something up...

It's straight to the multimeter in the morning.

Backlights Pt. 2

Well I got it working. The problem was that I had both of the 5V via 1Kohm resistor lines going through one resistor. I split it, used two resistors and it came right up. 

However, this revealed the fallowing video signal issues:

Backlights Pt 1

As you can see, I had a little bit more success today. I used my makeshift power supply and hooked up my inverter using JBerg's pinout with the exception the red line had to be connected directly to the 5V line instead of the 12V line which created a flashing backlight that I turned off really quickly.

The only problem is the backlights seemed to be on their lowest setting, which I should be able to fix by adding a voltage to the Orange floating line.

Update: I applied the 3.3V (3.75V actual) to the Orange floating pin and the screen got infinitesimally brighter, but hardly enough to notice. I am now stumped. My only theory is that 3.3V produces the dimmest light, and as the voltage drops, the light gets brighter BUT if there's no voltage at all, it defaults to being super dim. I know very little about this stuff, so it's just a theory. 

Update 2: I added an LED to the end of the positive line, creating a voltage drop to about 1.5V. This still had no effect, although, I can't be sure that should even work in the first place. :-/