It seems such a shame to just junk the display from an old, broken laptop but the hurdles to making it something useful are rather high. You need both a driver circuit to convert the LVDS video signal to VGA or HDMI and a power supply to drive the display backlight. You will also need some sort of cabinet to hold the display and its support components. Here’s a current solution idea for these problems.
Hack a Day: Turning a Broken Laptop’s LCD into a Fancy Monitor cited a rather cool looking monitor from a laptop’s LCD display. that then cited a couple of E-Bay vendors who supply driver boards for $15-$30 or so (I find $35 and up more normal).
There was also a link to bend the acrylic with a hot wire forming tool! since the display idea cited used the plastic as a stand and frame for the laptop display and the controller board. That then linked to Heating, bending, and gluing to make acrylic enclosures and Using nichrome wire to repair broken plastic parts. The latest thing in ‘cool’ is for your project boxes to be transparent and show off your handiwork in electronics fabrication. Acrylic plastic is not that expensive and it can be rather easy to fabricate into custom boxes for your creations.
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