Today I started working on the digital picture frame project. Yesterday I received the ViewSonic VA2259-SMH 22″ IPS display from Amazon. Delivery was super quick.
I unboxed the monitor and started the terrifying task of trying to remove the display from the plastic housing. After googling for the last 4 hours, there were no tutorials on how to do this. There were videos and directions for monitors that actually had bezels but not frame free ones.
I started right in, I got my plastic prying tools and started with the plastic bit at the bottom front of the screen. This was just a piece of plastic to hold the bottom of the monitor in the back and was held in place with four plastic clips. The most terrifying part is the snapping and crunching of the plastic.
Once the bottom piece of plastic was removed, I tested to the monitor to see if it still worked. Call me paranoid but just wanted to make sure it was still working. It was still working, so I moved forward.
Now it came to removing the entire back of the monitor housing. Remember with this model, there are NO screws holding this thing in place. So at first I was assuming that the display was held in place with black glue in some other devices that I have taken apart in the past. in my surprise, there was no glue.
More prying with the prying tools. I found out that the best way to remove the backing was to pry on both short sides of the display and make sure all the clips were unclipped. This worked the best because the bottom of the display did not have any clips, it was held in place with the plastic piece that was first taken off.
Once both short sides were unclipped, I flipped the display so that the back was showing (on a soft towel) and started to slowly lift the bottom of the backing up. In doing this also had to be careful of the control board that was still in the housing. I removed the control board and just let that rest on the towel. Continued to lift the backing until the entire thing was free from the display. There was no tape or glue what so ever.
That is it for the day. Waiting for delivery of the Raspberry Pi and also trying to figure out the picture frame.