My Lilliput 619GL-70TV/C/T arrived yesterday. It is a 7" model, with touchscreen, perfect for our project. And a very important part too, as it will be one of the only parts that will always be visible.
The first thing I did was measure it, because Nighty and I were afraid it would not fit in our cars' radio bays. Fortunately for us, it appears that without the bezel it fits perfectly.
Dimensions with bezel: 183mm x 125mm
Just the screen: 165mm x 106mm
There was a slight problem though: I bought this screen on Ebay, but it didn't come with any cables so we had to make a replacement cable for it. The Lilliput screens come with a power brick and some weird cable that has VGA and USB on one end, and some round s-video like plug on the other end. The screen itself has a matching round s-video type connector attached to a cable that's soldered to a bunch of contacts on the inside. But all of this was missing from my screen, with the exception of the cable that's soldered to the inside, of course.
The cable that was supposed to come with the screen looks like this:
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| The cable to the left is the original. The cable to the right is similar, but has no USB connector and belongs to a non-touchscreen version of the display. The only difference is the lack of USB plug and the fact that the round plug is male instead of female. |
Anyway, Nighty had a KVM cable lying around with a broken keyboard connector, ideal for our situation. We promptly proceeded to take apart the screen. We then looked up the wiring scheme for a similar Lilliput screen on the Net, and after a lot of measuring with a multimeter to verify which contact on the board maps to which pin on the Lilliput connector, we put together the information we needed. I have attached a clear wiring scheme, because it is pretty hard to find the right information online.
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| Wiring scheme | Controller board |
When all this hard work was done, I sat back and relaxed while Nighty was sweating on soldering the cable to the board. I had a good time. So did Nighty. The result of this can be seen on the following images, and I must say: Nighty, you are a soldering god!
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| VGA contacts | USB contacts | Board overview |
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| Board and connectors | Screen parts | Assembled screen |
When the time came for Nighty to drive me home at night we still needed to solder the USB connector for the touchscreen to the board, but we already tested if at least the VGA connection worked, and guess what? It did! It was pretty cool to see Ubuntu boot on such a tiny screen.
Now, you might be wondering: "Whoah dude! Hang on.. you said your screen came without cables and power brick. Where did they get the power from?!". Enter Bart, the Power Fairy (a friend of Nighty's) which brought us a 12V adaptor which could deliver 1000mA and fitted the power connector on the screen perfectly. Later on, this will be replaced by a self made connector with a molex plug on one side drawing 12V from the Opus power supply, and the female power connector on the other side. If you are planning on doing the same, please note that the core is positive and the outer shell negative. We don't know if you can damage your screen by feeding it with reverse polarity, but info we found online warned us to wire the power correctly, and we're just passing along the warning.
