'Bare' TFT panels

I'm looking a little project that involves putting a Mini-ITX board in a 3U box with a touchscreen TFT on the front for control. At the moment I plan on taking this display, cracking it open (thereby voiding any warranty it has) and mounting it in the box and feeding it off the VGA connector on the motherboard.

Pretty much all the ITX motherboards I've looked at have an LVDS connector and an inverter drive. As an integrated solution it sounds like a better idea to just get a plain panel and drive it with the LVDS port. It seems like there would be more options regarding panel size and resolution. My only question is, does anyone recommend a reputable place to buy a panel from that doesn't require a MOQ off 1000? The only place I've found so far is www.earthlcd.com, but the prices seem pretty high.

Also, if people think this is just going to open a big box of hurt and I should just stick with a VGA driven one then speak up.

We've had some luck with Vision Opto, although I'm not sure what you are calling a "bare panel" is what they sell. I believe all of their panels which truly are bare, accept a parallel interface of some sort with raw RGB values. If you can come up with your own drive circuitry though they have pretty decent prices. For example we got some 2" AMOLED displays for around US$12 ea. in quantites of 3.

Stu

I was hoping for a panel with a suitable LVDS (18 or 24bit) interface and backlight connection. Like you say, it looks like those panels you've linked to would still require some sort of interface to take the LVDS signals. I've rediscovered Trident UK so will peruse their site when I get home from work.

Okay, it looks like Trident are the people to go to. Their range of screens are pretty good and given the single unit quantities I'm purchasing, the price isn't too bad either. It certainly beats buying a replacement laptop panel off of ebay and then trying to find a datasheet for it once it arrives. I'm getting an 8.4" SVGA panel with touch overlay for less than £150.

I've still got to make an LVDS cable up to fit my choice of motherboard, but hopefully once it arrives I should be able to get it up and running pretty quickly (famous last words).

A logic analyser can be incredibly useful for that particular task. It was for exactly this that I got the LogicPort here.

Cheers

I was thinking of getting a LogicPort, but couldn't really justify the cost for the amount of use it would get. So I got a Saleae Logic instead which has handled everything I've needed up to now (i2c and SPI mostly). But I doubt it'll be quick enough to handle this.

I've got the necessary datasheets and everything seems to line up so I'm confident it won't be necessary. There are a few examples of people doing this on the 'net, the guy I've been dealing with at Trident has also said he'll try and help out if he can.