Zombie Laptop Is An Innovation Station

Introduction

If you work for a big company you'd know that "buzzwords" is a huge business. We don't just misuse them, we also criticize those who do (like what I'm doing now). Innovation tops the list of words that became annoying in the recent years.

My therapist used to always tell me "Don't get mad, get even". So, I decided to create my own Innovation Station.

Let there be Zombie

Started with a dead laptop and removed the internals.

I needed to get the monitor's model number.

After a little bit of online searching, I found a Monitor Driver Controller Board here:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01MXZVI5X/ref=ppx_od_dt_b_asin_title_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

There were a lot cheaper options, but this one has multiple inputs. Besides, I did not want to take a chance or wait for couple of month.

Remote was broken when it arrived, but everything else was OK.

I bought a bigger adapter from the local used electronics store.

A little bit of testing and I'm ready to continue my project.

Putting it all together

Started the assembly process by making sure the monitor connection is secure with heavy duty tape.

I then soldered couple of wires to the bottom of the USB port.

The two wires will be used to power a Google Coral Dev Board that I won in a previous competition:

https://www.hackster.io/contests/2019chinausyoungmakercompetition#category-491

The board has with one USB port so I acquired a USB hub from one of our software vendors at a conference.

and made it better!

I needed a camera, but I didn't want to pay for the fancy one that was made for the board. So, I turned the old laptop camera into a USB camera using one of the online tutorials.

Last but not least, I configured my Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ to output display to composite video instead of HDMI.

IT'S ALIVE!