As mentioned in another thread, I have this broken 20.5" or so LCD. There was a bad cap that I replaced but apparently fried the backlight somehow when putting it back together - when I buttoned up and powered on, one of the driver transistors gave up the magic smoke.
I removed that transistor (a SOIC8) and replaced with like but the monitor would not come up any longer - it stays black.
Now I have two ways to go, wondering what people thought of each:
Option 1 - Continue pursuing fixing the CCFL driver. I'm at a loss why the CCFL driver would stay dead now, could I have possibly destroyed the oscillator IC (OZ960GN) or something else likely is causing it to stay in shutdown? I'm getting about 20V input into the CCFL driver and the rest of the electronics appear to be on - the power switch will toggle the green LED. I will need to see if hooking up to VGA will stop it from going to sleep mode but it probably does that fine too.
I tried sticking a scope on the output of the switching transistors and they don't appear to toggle when powering on. Looks like an H-Tree output driver that drives all 6 transformers in parallel.
Option 2 - Do away with the CCFL and mod to LED. What I'm wondering is if I get a LED strip that's too long for the LCD, can the LED strips be cut easily/safely? As it's not a common size, I likely will have to hack an LED strip to fit. Also what happens if I get a strip that's too short, obviously I'll get some dark spots on the sides but how bad is it? Seems like I will need to get 6 strips of some combination to fully populate this monitor and that's starting to get a bit pricey for custom lengths...
I removed that transistor (a SOIC8) and replaced with like but the monitor would not come up any longer - it stays black.
Now I have two ways to go, wondering what people thought of each:
Option 1 - Continue pursuing fixing the CCFL driver. I'm at a loss why the CCFL driver would stay dead now, could I have possibly destroyed the oscillator IC (OZ960GN) or something else likely is causing it to stay in shutdown? I'm getting about 20V input into the CCFL driver and the rest of the electronics appear to be on - the power switch will toggle the green LED. I will need to see if hooking up to VGA will stop it from going to sleep mode but it probably does that fine too.
I tried sticking a scope on the output of the switching transistors and they don't appear to toggle when powering on. Looks like an H-Tree output driver that drives all 6 transformers in parallel.
Option 2 - Do away with the CCFL and mod to LED. What I'm wondering is if I get a LED strip that's too long for the LCD, can the LED strips be cut easily/safely? As it's not a common size, I likely will have to hack an LED strip to fit. Also what happens if I get a strip that's too short, obviously I'll get some dark spots on the sides but how bad is it? Seems like I will need to get 6 strips of some combination to fully populate this monitor and that's starting to get a bit pricey for custom lengths...