A few years ago I picked up a used
HP 2710p Tablet PC after seeing the contestants on Project Runway use it for their designs. I had never used a Cintiq or tablet PC before so I had no idea what worlds a penenabled display was about to open for me; Now using my old Graphire feels like the most awkward thing in the world.
But as much as I love using the tablet to draw, the laptop's hardware is a little lacking. It's not unusual to have to wait 15 minutes to open or save Photoshop files, and you can expect to sit back and wait for a change in zoom or location to process. Meanwhile I have a perfectly capable, easily & cheaply upgradable desktop going to waste.
So that is what brings me here! I needed to replace my display assembly so I negotiated to get a couple of whole assemblies for cheap; I am using the old one for the experimentation process, and the other is being reserved for the final build.
I do not know a whole lot about this stuff, just what I have been reading here for the past few days, most notably
Trashie's thread, so I am very much in favor of hearing anyone's thoughts on this. Even if nothing comes of it hopefully whatever info I find can be added to the Wiki, which is lacking info on this particular tablet.
Here is the disassembled assembly. The circuitry had foil shielding over it that I had to peal off.
Digitizer label. I tried contacting Wacom to see if they could offer up any info on it. The US office pointed me to the Japanese office, who I have yet to hear anything back from. In the meantime the US office contacted me a second time telling me they asked around and discovered they are now allowed to share any information about it due to agreements with HP. I don't expect to ever hear from the JP office, but who knows.
Panel label. Before purchasing the assemblies I searched Google to try and find out if I could obtain a controller board for the panel, my results telling me it was a Samsung panel, which the controller board people said they could support. Well now that I have mine cracked open, it clearly isn't a Samsung. The initial controller shop could not support this 40pin LVDS connector, so what I thought was going to be the easiest part of the conversion suddenly put the whole project in jeopardy. After a few days of emailing I found a seller that claims their M.NT68676.2A controller kit will work. I am still hesitant about it, but they say they are certain. I have not yet cracked open the assembly I am saving for the final build, but with my luck I'm half expecting to do so and find out it's actually Samsung or something else.
The Wacom board. As expected from Trashie's build, the ZD1 is not there. On the plus side the connector is 14 pin and others have seem to have luck with them.
The original cable. It splits off to the left for the digitizer and to the right for the LCD.
The covering on the cable pealed back. Already we are seeing some differences from Trashie's tablet.
The pin layout is different, for better or worse that remains to be seen, but it does rule out me being able to just follow his build. As you can see there are two groups of wires, on the left we have wires coming from 5 & 6, and on the right we have a group of five coming from pins 9-13 (perhaps the four USB lines?). Then to confound things even more...
You peal back the covering even more to find out the wires from pins 5 & 6 don't even go anywhere! At first I thought I tore them by accident, nope, nor were they ever connected to each other like a jumper cable. I did notice that the fabric sleeve has what looks to be copper wire woven into it; are these likely some sort of ground lines? Like I said, I don't know too much about this stuff so please let me know what you think.
The rest of these are just close ups for the board. Here is the connector.
So what do you all think? Does this look like a simple USB + diode job or something much different?
Thanks for looking, and again, advice is appreciated.
