Gutting a Gateway 2000 Colorbook

[dylanrush]

I have one working Gateway 2000 Colorbook in great condition aside form a dead CMOS battery.

I have another that I got on eBay for around $40 shipped with obvious water damage. Lots of rust on the outside a bit on the inside and the main board.I bought it thinking I might be able to get one or two spare parts. The battery looks fine. I am thinking the screen, keyboard and trackball probably also work.

I am thinking of gutting it and putting a raspberry pi in there.

Pictured is the interface to the display - the bundle of green, yellow, white and grey. What are the chances that this is a signal that I could replicate? It's probably not VGA, right? (Can't be - too many wires). Would I need an oscilloscope to try to reverse engineer it? Or is there a common intermediate digital signal that laptops of this era would have used?

 

[GiGaBiTe]

The cable from the screen to the board is generally not standardized, but the screen itself does have a display standard. It's probably some type of LVDS signaling. You'll have to disassemble the screen to get a part number off of it.

There are cheap Chinese adapter boards that can drive LVDS monitors and give you a variety of display connectors. VGA and HDMI are pretty standard, you just have to get the cable going to the screen wired correctly.

 

[3lectr1c]

Pictured is the interface to the display - the bundle of green, yellow, white and grey. What are the chances that this is a signal that I could replicate? It's probably not VGA, right? (Can't be - too many wires). Would I need an oscilloscope to try to reverse engineer it? Or is there a common intermediate digital signal that laptops of this era would have used?

What's the part number of the LCD? If you're lucky, there will be a datasheet available with the pin-out. It's likely some kind of parallel signaling.
Do be aware that the Colorbook's LCD is a low quality passive matrix display, so make sure the effort of doing a pi retrofit will be worth it to you