Today I almost had one of those "You're a Dumbass" moments. Possibly the would be most expensive one in a while. Just for background information, I just brought home 17" Samsung monitor I had shipped, opened it up and fired it up to make sure it work. It works, so I immediately proceed to dismantling it.

After 10 or 15 minutes of careful dissection, I had gutted the entire monitor and all the parts were laying around my room plasted with post it notes (I made it a habit to label everything, much easeir when assembling again, if I have to). Armed with just the main board and the thin glass LCD panel, I hooked it up to my PC next to my regular monitor.

It's a pretty sweet setup, since the naked LCD is transparent (or somewhere between translucent and transparent) you can actually see through the data being displayed, andits very thin (2mm I suspect). Just wanted to test if the LCD panel and the controller board would function without the backlight or the control panel being plugged in, and just as expected it does. This is where it all started going down hill.

The LCD Panel was sitting vertically on the table leaning against my regular monitor, and it started to slip... and then it fall straight to floor. Time slowed down for me watching this. You have to understand this is a glass panel is 17 inches across and about 2 mm thick (extremly delicate), and all along the edge fccs connecting the panel to the controller board which can be easily ripped off. I then heard a crack, and upon looking at it I can saw the dreaded lines on the screen. At this moment, in my head I heard a echo of "Prior Proper Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance" and why putting it so carelessly vertically on my table was a bad idea.

It hadn't been even 30 minutes since I opened the monitor and already it was stripped bare, on the floor and I suspect it being cracked. But upon close inspection, I couldn't see any cracks, so I spent an hour or so re-checking the connections, reconnecting everything, testing out all the connections from the main board to the video controller on the panel it self (maybe a wire on the connector got loose). Still nothing.

Finally I accepted my screw up and proceeded to put back the monitor back the way it was. But just before putting it away, plug it in one last time and check if it works. I never thought I would be so happy to see a message that read "Check Cable Signal". The panel is alive! How this is possible, I am still not sure, but my guess is that it might have been a loose connection all along.

This is how I almost broke a sweet monitor. For now I have a second monitor until I finish making the LED array and the box for the projector. I will post again with some updates regarding this project in the near future.