{"id":261,"date":"2013-07-06T20:02:45","date_gmt":"2013-07-07T01:02:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mikesmods.com\/mm-wp\/?p=261"},"modified":"2013-07-31T22:12:47","modified_gmt":"2013-08-01T03:12:47","slug":"hacking-the-macbook-pro-retina-lcd-part-1-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/mikesmods.com\/mm-wp\/?p=261","title":{"rendered":"Hacking the Macbook Pro Retina LCD, Part 1.2: Controller Addendum"},"content":{"rendered":"

D’oh.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

A shipment of components including the connectors intended for the Macbook LCD breakout board arrived yesterday.\u00a0 I-PEX components are not carried at the usual US distributors, so I opted to order a TE part that a random source seemed to indicate might mate (5-2069716-2).\u00a0 Well…<\/p>\n

\"Well,<\/a>

Well that isn’t going to work.<\/p><\/div>\n

That’ll teach me for not doing my research.\u00a0 The pin pitch isn’t even correct.\u00a0 So I cost myself a few bucks and a week of time.\u00a0 Damn it all.\u00a0 But I have ordered a few genuine I-PEX Cabline-CA connectors on eBay, so in only another two weeks, I should have things figured out enough to spin a “proper” simple breakout.\u00a0 The long leadtime of OSH Park is really killing me these days.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, Daniel has sent me some more photos of his Samsung controller boards and has made great progress in his efforts.\u00a0 The Samsung boards look like this:<\/p>\n

\"Macbook<\/a>

Macbook Retina controller board, Samsung version – component side<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Macbook<\/a>

Macbook Retina controller board, Samsung version – connector side<\/p><\/div>\n

His progress has compelled me to do a little additional work of my own – even though I swore I wouldn’t solder more jumpers to the panel.\u00a0 Oh well, promises were meant to be broken.\u00a0 In order to know where to stick wires, I have spent some time investigating the hardware that makes up the controller PCB.\u00a0 The brain of the display is the ParadeTech DP635 LCD timing controller.\u00a0 While the specification for this part is not freely available, ParadeTech sells several other Tcons, such as the DP628.\u00a0 Here is a block diagram of the innards of that part:<\/p>\n

\"Block<\/a>

Block diagram for the ParadeTech DP628 DP Tcon.<\/p><\/div>\n

We will assume that the DP635 works sorta-similar.\u00a0 From this, we can deduce that this IC takes in the DisplayPort signal and spits out something compatible with the chip-on-glass driver ICs on the panel.\u00a0 In the ‘628 this is miniLVDS, and it’s reasonable to guess that this may be similar to the way it is done in the ‘635.\u00a0 The backside of the controller PCB has pairs of testpoints labeled D1D1P\/D1D1N, D1D2P\/D1D2N through D9D1P\/D9D1N, D9D2P\/D9D2N, nine pairs of pairs in all.\u00a0 Presumably this is eighteen differential pairs carrying the decoded video data as converted from the DisplayPort source.\u00a0 As my panels are functional I will leave this as a theory and not pull off the IC to probe it out to the testpoints.<\/p>\n

Speaking of testpoints, there are plenty of them.\u00a0 Here’s a list of the marked points, primarily found on the connector side of the PCB:<\/p>\n