DIYing a Portable Monitor

So I swapped that laptop over to a 4K panel a while back, and selling off the leftover 2K screen would’ve been a losing deal. Better to just mod it into something.

There’s no shortage of kits online for turning a laptop panel into a portable monitor, but my list of demands was a bit long.

• 2K (2560x1440) support
• HDR support
• USB-C single-cable
• Built-in battery would be nice
• As thin and light as possible

Which all sounds like the kind of wishlist that never ships, so I settled for “however many of these I can actually get.”

Lucky for me, I found a kit that covers most of it. Thin and light is fine; a battery is out of the question. At least the single-cable thing works, which makes up for some of it.

• 2K HDR support
• USB-C single-cable
• Reasonably thin and light
• But you glue the panel in yourself — tape it from the back first, then apply the adhesive

Here’s how it turned out:

As you can see, the ports are MiniHDMI, USB-C for power, MicroUSB for power, and USB-C single-cable.

It feeds straight into a Switch or any other device that does USB-C video out — you just have to power the monitor first, and then it passes power back over the same cable to your Switch / laptop / phone. No second power brick.

All in all, pretty convenient.