I'm such a bone head!

[rmusick]

Hey can anyone possibly help me out with a question.  I got a Dell 19 inch CRT for another project,  I can't give you the model cause like a bone head I threw the casing away, and that's the problem.  In the case was the controller for the Menu.  It was mounted on the front part of the case and then attached to the montior-mother board via a ribbon cable.  Well that was tossed out as well.  My guess is that this was an analog controller, so I i figured I could get a homemade connector with wires attached.  I could find which ever is ground and touch them one by one to ground and record my results and make a new controller.  Is my logic flawed? Could it be digial and not analog?  Could it short the entire board out?  I know it has a Samsung dube in it.  It is a standard VGA-meaning ONLY one connection. 

[elkameleon]

+1 on your bonehead comment More than likely it was digital...

[rmusick]

Well if it was digital then I am royally screwed. 

[rmusick]

BTW the monitor looks like this:

[MonMotha]

Most of the time, the remote board on digital monitors is just a bunch of pushbuttons hooked up to some wires in either a matrix or single signal wire per button config.  If you can find ground, just try grounding each wire out and see what happens.  If there appears to be no dedicated ground pin, then it's probably a matrix.

[Gray_Area]

I just picked up two 17" CRT PC monitors for free. They were tossing them. Worst case, you'll need to shell out a few for another one.

[skuttduck]

I used to have a Dell Monitor like that on my desk.

We used to inventory them as well.

Since we went to our new inventory system a lot of the old salvaged stuff didn't come over but what I do see are these models.
19FP
M782
M782p
M78P
P793

Hopefully one of those model numbers will point you in the right direction.

[scofthe7seas]

Dell stuff is almost ALWAYS proprietary. They're jerks like that. They actually just came out with a "new" HDMI (does exactly the same thing, but without sound) that is a different shape, specifically so you have to buy their stupid cable.

[MonMotha]

Dell has gotten MUCH LESS proprietary over the ages.  They used to do things just for the sake of being different (e,g. their old power supplies that used the same connector as standard ATX supplies but with a totally incompatible pinout and STILL requiring some only semi-standard extra connections), but they seem to have gotten away from that.

The remote board inside the monitor will be different with each make/model, anyway.  Dell has very little to do with this.  Most Dell monitors are just someone else's monitor with the plastic changed so that it says Dell.  Many of the later high-end "Dell" CRTs are identical internally to a Sony model.

As for this "new" HDMI connector, you sure it's not just one of the standard (albeit uncommon) mini/micro (type C or D) HDMI connectors or a DisplayPort connector?  Many cameras use the mini/micro HDMI connector, but people often thing it's proprietary since it's otherwise fairly uncommon.  And Apple, for example, uses the farily uncommon mini-displayport connector, but while it's uncommon, it is part of the standard, though it was introduced by Apple prior to adoption as a standard.  Displayport can carry audio just like HDMI, as well as a whole bunch of other "extras", owing to its packet based structure, but often times the cheap, passive "DisplayPort to HDMI" adapters won't work with audio due to limitations of the DisplayPort drivers and hardware on the source.

See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDMI#Connectors
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displayport
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini_displayport

[scofthe7seas]

Someone's gots some Dell stock. 

I suppose I might have assumed (incorrectly) about the Displayport being as I've only ever seen it on the new Dells we have here. 

[MonMotha]

Maybe in some tiny amount in a mutual fund.  I actually rather dislike Dell due to some bad experiences with their low-end consumer crap (not to mention blowing a hole in a motherboard due to their POS proprietary power supply that they no longer use), though I'm told the enterprise grade stuff is decent though costly.

My Lenovo laptop has a DisplayPort connection, and many ATi graphics cards have it, too.  DisplayPort allows you to do multi-head output on a single port via daisy chain and also has very good 3D support, so that's how they support things like 6-8 monitors on a single graphics card.  Apple is using DisplayPort, too, though in the "mini" variety connector that almost nobody else uses.  Unfortunately, DisplayPort monitors are still fairly uncommon, but they're starting to show up on high end models where DisplayPort's advantages (like supporting high precision color depths properly) come in handy.

DisplayPort is also a completely open standard (other than the DRM portion) and is free to implement, unlike HDMI which requires royalties and difficult to obtain documentation.  The latest version (1.2) of the DisplayPort standard can be purchased (albeit at a somewhat steep price) from VESA under non-discriminatory terms, and the older version (1.1a) is available for free.

[scofthe7seas]

[Kevin Mullins]

MonMotha knows more about this stuff than Cosby knows about Jello pudding, that's for sure.