I wonder if anyone has considered re-purposing “broken” LED televisions for this purpose.
Often, as an LED TV ages, it becomes less efficient at eliminating the waste heat generated by its power supply, GPU, etc., as ventilation holes become clogged with dust. When the set is powered up, the internal temperature gradients become larger than they were when set was new, ultimately leading to localized thermal expansion cycles in the thin glass screen as the set is powered on and off. Eventually, the screen develops an internal crack (usually withing a month or six of the warranty expiring) which ruins the picture quality. When this happens, people usually just chuck the set.
This happened to me several months ago, and, not wanting to waste some perfectly good hardware (I’d thought I might play around with re-purposing the GPU board) I cracked it open, removed the components I wanted to keep, and put it back together. Plugging it in, I found that I had an extremely bright back-lit tabletop, which immediately clicked in my head as something more useful than the GPU board (which, honestly was probably just going to end up collecting dust in my garage).
Reading this post got me to thinking, though. “Broken” LED TV’s (e.g., ones with cracked screens) can be had on the cheap, are super bright, and are wall- (or even ceiling-) mountable. Hell, they often can be had with a wall mounting bracket still attached. They aren’t unattractive, either.
I wonder if anyone has considered re-purposing “broken” LED televisions for this purpose.
Often, as an LED TV ages, it becomes less efficient at eliminating the waste heat generated by its power supply, GPU, etc., as ventilation holes become clogged with dust. When the set is powered up, the internal temperature gradients become larger than they were when set was new, ultimately leading to localized thermal expansion cycles in the thin glass screen as the set is powered on and off. Eventually, the screen develops an internal crack (usually withing a month or six of the warranty expiring) which ruins the picture quality. When this happens, people usually just chuck the set.
This happened to me several months ago, and, not wanting to waste some perfectly good hardware (I’d thought I might play around with re-purposing the GPU board) I cracked it open, removed the components I wanted to keep, and put it back together. Plugging it in, I found that I had an extremely bright back-lit tabletop, which immediately clicked in my head as something more useful than the GPU board (which, honestly was probably just going to end up collecting dust in my garage).
Reading this post got me to thinking, though. “Broken” LED TV’s (e.g., ones with cracked screens) can be had on the cheap, are super bright, and are wall- (or even ceiling-) mountable. Hell, they often can be had with a wall mounting bracket still attached. They aren’t unattractive, either.
Thoughts?