Ok, Got my A4 EL sheet in today.
Here is what it looks like behind the screen powered-off:
And with it on:
I asked him to send Aqua, but he was out of stock so I ended up getting light blue. So not quite Indiglo. But close enough. I think it looks cool regardless.
With that out of the way, Its time to figure out how to cut this thing down to size, and get it to fit between the panel and the driver electronics. Not an easy task. Considering I need to pick it right the first time, as i dont want to kill this $60 sheet of A4 EL stuff.... Also the inverter is HUGE. I still havent figured out what to do about that, yet...
Here is the electrodes on the panel itself:
Also, Here is the electrode connections from the inverter, Clearly sticking out from the edge of the EL sheet. This wasnt going to work, for one its too thick so I Cant fold it back, and have enough room to put it back together. It just had to go.
If I cut that out, Then what can I do about it? Well I can scratch through the laminate on the backside of course! This allowed me to reconnect the electrode wires from the inverter.
So, after some careful cutting, you end up with this:
Now, that leaves just the top electrode to deal with. What to do about that? Well fold it out of the way behind it! Well, this is ok, but you have to make sure the fold is just before, or on the edge of the visible area. Folding the EL sheet in a visible area, can cause delamination or electrode distortion, killing the light in that section. Keep this in mind.
Here is the folded electrode, you can just see it sticking up:
Here is the backside mount of the original wires:
Test fit:
And lets light it up!
So, now its time to get it back into the LCD assembly. Well, this is where I ran into yet another problem: The original electrode wires were too thick! Well, I had to cut away some of the top folded plastic, I also had to cut back a tiny bit of the Zebra strip (conductive rubber between LCD glass and PCB). And solder in some 30 gauge wire. This is very thin wire, But its thin enough JUST to fit... Luckily its not causing any problems, because the inverter carries anywhere from 90 to 150VAC.
Here is a picture of it off. Yes you can still use it without the backlight on
Now another problem: I had to make a new LCD ribbon cable between the motherboard and the LCD. The one I had, someone pretty much screwed it, scraped it, severing some wires. So, I decided to grab an old U-ATA133 IDE Ribbon, and make up a new one:
And Here are the results:
It works... YAY!!!!
Still more to do, Figuring out where to mount the inverter, And see if I can coax bbraun to make me a small control panel enable/disable the backlight and brightness.
The inverter pulls 560Ma at full brightness. This drops substantially when you slowly bring the voltage down to the inverter.
I will likely make a small decoder/driver card that goes into the ROM slot for the control panel in system 6/7 to work.