I’ve already made this post on the Framework forum, so it might be familiar to anyone who saw it there, but I am hoping someone here might be able to help me with this problem.
I am trying to make a touch-screen tablet based on the Framework mainboard, but the biggest hurdle right now is finding a way to connect a screen to the main board.
I don’t want to use one of the external displays that use USB for power since I assume they consume more power, and don’t automatically turn on and off with the laptop power/sleep state. Also, someone has done that really well already, and I thought it was a bit thicker than I would like. It’s obviously better than the nothing I have now though.
I know there are connections on the mainboard for USB and I2C touch screen, so it is capable of doing this. The problem is that I can’t find any decent options for getting a cable or the male end of the connector that framework uses on the mainboard. In fact, the only option I could find is a $42 wire harness that would still require some sort of adapter to the connector used by the display panel.
Can anyone find any options that would be less awkward and, more importantly, less expensive? I’m looking at the Framework official eDP cable and wondering if I can expose the relevant connections on their connector. Could that work?
I know it wouldn’t be 1-to-1 in the connections. It is eDP on both ends, so I’m hoping I could just solder the cable that works with the display to the connector on the one end of the official framework eDP cable. I’m pretty sure I saw somewhere that the official cable is 40-pin on both ends, even though it doesn’t use the touch screen connections on the mainboard, so I assume I could do something similar.
Would I be able to connect the different pins with GND in their name to each other for an easier conversion, or would that cause an issue? Would I be able to do the same with the pins that have identical names (3x “BL_PWR” on mainboard vs 4x “BL_PWR” on display connector)?