Assembling the Display

With the proof-of-concept trial done, it was now necessary to make things durable enough to be usable and finished enough to not distract from reading. Between the base and the display, the display was the more important in this respect since it would be the more jostled and bumped around of the two and would be the one that I'd be spending time looking at.

Different displays with different available space, materials, wiring location, and etc. will require different solutions to this problem.  Depending on your situation, you may need to be pretty clever and crafty to come up with a workable arrangement.  In my case, it took a bit of rigging to get things to work out...

The size of the display connector and the space in the display housing had already been considered.  I was sure the connector could be made to fit one way or another.  So, the first step was to cut an opening through which it would extend. This I accomplished by carving out parts of the top and bottom of the housing with a Dremel.

The intent was to bolt the connector directly to the housing, but was a bit of a tight squeeze and it turned out that there wouldn't be a way to do it securely. To get around those problems, I cut a metal picture hanger* in half and bolted each half to one side of the connector to form mounting extensions. Then I used the Dremel to cut the housing in places to fit the extensions as solidly as possible. Finally, I was able to fit the housing together and had a fairly decent connector added to the display.

Unfortunately, several of the wires were ripped out of their fragile connections in the process of fitting the connector. After a lot of tedious resoldering, the display was reassembled and tested. It worked pretty well at first. But the connector was a bit loose, and I found it possible to wiggle it enough to short something and cause the computer to reboot.

Reopening the display, I wedged a couple of small nuts between the housing and extensions, and then applied cyanoacrylate adhesive (i.e. “super glue”) to hold things in place. I also applied some of the glue to the connector extension nut/bolt connections to keep them from loosening.

The display was again reassembled and tested after everything had dried. Finally, I had a good, solid connector that was rugged enough for normal use and didn't seem to look too bad.

* If you're going to mod stuff, it helps to have a lot of junk lying around. :)