Macintosh SE with LCD

pff000

New Tinkerer
Oct 1, 2024
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10
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Hi everyone,

This is my first post ... I wanted to share this SE I recently rebuilt using an LCD screen and a bunch of parts made available by the community,

The analogue board was replaced with a new Ressurections SE Analogue board from Kero's mac mods. I populated just a few components to provide -5 volts from a regular SE power supply as in the original analogue board (I don't think I need this but it seemed wise to include). I also soldered some wires to route the video from the analogue board to a texElec RGB2HDMI. The 4 pin Molex connector provides power to the RGB2HDMI and LCD screen controller.

The power supply is a new one by TTdesign inside a sony enclosure. (with a nice glowing LED!)

The screen is a Pimoroni 8inch HDMI screen and it runs at 1024x768, for a pixel perfect (scaled by 2) picture.
The screen controller has a breakout with buttons to access the screen menu, for brightness, etc, which I mounted underneath the apple logo.

I have 3d printed brackets to hold the screen and controller in place underneath this adapter
(https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4888289)

As you can see there is also a bluescsi (from Joe's computer museum).
And I replaced the battery in the logic board with a cr2032 adapter from Siliconinsider.

The keyboard... a good chunk of the original switches were not working. I replaced all switches with new Matias clicky switches, and fixed some traces that were damaged.
Unfortunately the left ADB port is not working (trying to use it freezes the mouse). But the right ADB port works fine!

I did recap the logic board too, with a kit from Console5.

I'm not sure how ppl around here feel about replacing the CRT, but I find the LCD experience to be quite nice and a pleasure to use. Although it is no longer necessary I have Afterdark installed and often leave the machine on in the background to enjoy the screensavers :)
 

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pff000

New Tinkerer
Oct 1, 2024
3
10
3
@Kay K.M.Mods
One of your analog boards was used in a very unique way!
Maybe @Kay K.M.Mods would be willing to make an analogue board revision with the CRT circuitry replaced with an rgb2hdmi or a pico vga adapter, and some headers for powering the screen :)

I'd also like to explore how to control the LCD brightness with the pot in the analogue board. It may be possible to use a small microcontroler to generate a pwm signal to control the backlight. I know this is done in modern laptops, but I don't know if I can do this with the pimoroni LCD driver.
 
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naruse

New Tinkerer
Sep 14, 2024
25
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This is pretty nice to say the least! -- which LCD panel did you get?
 

pff000

New Tinkerer
Oct 1, 2024
3
10
3
This is pretty nice to say the least! -- which LCD panel did you get?
I used this Pimoroni 8inch LCD with HDMI driver:
Its a high quality display as far as I can tell and the picture looks great.

The button breakout cable can be replaced by a longer one to fit outside the case. You don't really need the button breakout except if you want to adjust the brightness (via the on-screen menu).
 
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