Turning Smashed TVs into Realistic Artificial Daylight

this television is broken and I actually got it out of the skip which is where most people would put a television if it stops working because it's essentially useless from then on or is it well it turns out there's some incredible technology inside a television that can be repurposed and turned into false window lights now because of the technology in the television the light given off by these looks amazingly close to real daylight so they're perfect for giving a fresh and light atmosphere to dark rooms or corridors they're also great for long dark winter days and can give you a boost in energy and your overall mood which makes them incredibly unique and I would say somewhat valuable so sit back as I show you how to dismantle a television to make one of these let's get to it this video is sponsored by skill share the online learning community with over 25,000 classes ranging from design business art and more sign up for a free two months unlimited access trial by visiting the link in the description and start learning a new skill today so with only a few exceptions the vast majority of TVs and monitors should be able to be turned into light panels even ones that are smashed but before we begin I'll just explain the trick behind how the final lights fool you into thinking that the light coming from them is actually real daylight so as I've already implied this hallway is lit entirely by a single false window light that has been made out of a 30-inch computer monitor now even for me here in person it looks remarkably convincing it just looks like real daylight on a cloudy day and there are several reasons why this is the case but the primary one is that because the back lights panels in TVs feature a friend lens layer the light cast from them after a little modification appears to be coming from much further away as the origin is pushed back beyond the rear the panel this reduces the effect of what's known as the inverse square law so objects further away from the panel aren't that much dimmer than objects close at hand compared to a basic LED panel which features no focusing layers you can see that the light drop off is much less apparent in comparison thanks to this reduced light fall-off it fools your brain into thinking that the light is coming from far away and thus it looks like daylight now getting the back lights panels out of old TVs and monitors is actually quite straightforward but it does vary depending on the type and brand typically however it's just a case of unplugging it from the mains and lying it down flat so that you can unscrew any screws on the back once this is done the plastics should separate and you can access the internals here again you'll have to unscrew anything you can find and strip out any metal brackets and electronics if it has only recently been unplugged from the mains you definitely need to avoid touching the back of these boards though as there may be some power still stored in the capacitors which you could still get a nasty shock from as you strip out the components make sure to separate them into groups of electronics plastics and metals and then take them to your local recycling center to be disposed off properly now computer monitors as opposed to TVs tend to be much simpler to disassemble as all I had to do with this one was remove four screws on the back unclip the plastics and then lift out the few internals which won't even screw it in place so with that done you should just have the panel itself and it's with this that we're going to make the lightweight but before we do that we need to actually again continue to disassemble it and remove the metal border now usually these have some clips at the side which can just be removed by inserting a screwdriver and pushing upwards with it we can now remove the LCD panel itself which is what usually generates the image but in this case it's faulty so it needs to be removed for better light efficiency we can now see the backlight itself and there's actually a lot going on here which is why it's so useful for faking daylight because it's got a lot of friend layers and reflectors inside to help push the light forwards out of it and that's why this is actually quite a valuable thing that would just otherwise be thrown away and that's to me unbelievable so going through these different layers you usually find first a diffusion layer and then underneath you'll find the friend layer and this has a lot of microscopic grooves in it that cause the light to be reflected forwards and it's a really interesting panel actually like if you take it out you can see this is bending the light so you can see things that are behind it before they actually get behind it is quite strange stuff and then after that you'll generally find another diffusion sheet and then the acrylic back panel now this is quite interesting as well because they usually have lots of diffusion pads on them these are very small and they spread the light so again this is why these things are actually pretty useful and would be otherwise hard to build if you were to build it out of separate components with these parts put to one side we should now be able to see the backlight itself in the case of this monitor it's actually a bank of LEDs which is much more common on newer displays but if it's an older type display you're likely to come across a couple of CCFL or compact fluorescent tubes these are very delicate and are made out of glass so make sure that you don't crack them as they do contain mercury which is of course toxic less care doesn't need to be taken with LEDs however as they are pretty safe in either case neither backlight type is particularly straightforward to power the compact fluorescents though you can buy a separate power inverter board which is a great way of hooking them off quickly and easily but it is dealing with fairly high voltages and that's potentially unsafe if you don't know what you're doing so it's not something that I'd personally recommend however with the LED variety they often wide up in completely different ways so it's going to be quite hard for me to convey you know how to wive more properly and they still deal with fairly high voltages for example probing around with a multimeter I discovered that the LED backlights from my monitor were wired up in two series sets of 23 LEDs assuming each LED has a Ford voltage of 3.3 volts that means that we'd need 76 volts to power it which is a bit difficult to achieve as readily available voltage boosters only go up to about 50 volts or so this does of course vary depending on the display so you may have better look another alternative would be to split the series up and power it in low voltage chunks which is certainly doable but it's very fiddly work so again I don't really recommend it so the safest and easiest thing to do regardless of the backlight type is to replace it with something else and if you're familiar with this channel it'll come as no surprise to know that we're going to use any these strips right so these basically can just be stuck in place as they have an adhesive on the back that can just be peeled away and this allows them to be stuck firmly where the previous back lights used to be for testing purposes you can hook it up to a 12 volt power adapter to see it light up now a big advantage of using LED strips like this is that they are intended to be a light source and not typically battle i'ts so one thing you'll notice with the white light coming off a monitor is that it tends to make Reds look oversaturated and the colors can look a bit weird but with this they're much more neutral as long as you go with a decent CRI rating for the LED strips and I've got a link in the description to a set that I recommend so now that they are wired up it's time to put back the original layers so we'll start with the acrylic and with this in place you can see how evenly it spreads the light out from the LEDs thanks to the tiny diffusion pads on its underside when one of the diffusion sheets is placed on top of this it blurs the pants together and gives it a very soft appearance usually the frontal layer gets put back next which focuses the light forwards and because of this it gives the impression of 3d space behind the panel this is actually a really interesting effect and is the reason why the panel's look so much like real daylight as the light appears to be coming from far away after this friendly you'd usually have another diffusion layer but I recommend leaving this off as it does reduce the daylight effect quite a lot now if you find that the original frame doesn't fit properly due to the LED strips just use tape instead while reasonably presentable it isn't particularly smooth or even so to neaten it up we can use a few right angle aluminum lengths that have been cut at an angle with a saw this makes a really neat frame and hold them in place we can simply glue them down using epoxy whilst that's drying we can extend the power wise and make the wire look neater by sliding on some stylish braided sleeving on the other end of this we can simply add a power socket so as you can see they emit a decent amount of light and they do so in a very soft manner which means that you can look at them directly and that it's actually really Pleasant on your eyes which makes for a really nice soft illumination in a room though because they project the light outwards fairly directly having them mounted on angled ceilings really helps to sell the daylight effect even more now one thing to be aware of is that some very old or very large flat screen panels skimp out on the frontal layer that makes the daylight effect possible and instead that they just feature a Bank of compact fluorescent tubes if this is the case with your screen you can just carefully remove them and replace them with LED strips wiring them up in parallel the downside to this kind of display is that you won't get the same reduction in the inverse square law so it loses out on a lot of the daylight effects but on the flip side you will have a much brighter panel as there'll be more LED strips giving off the light it still looks good at any rate another thing to note is that you can also use old laptop screens for making smaller daylight panels and I have a dedicated video on this which you can find a link to in the description at any rate not only do you get wonderful daylight illumination to enjoy at any time of day but you'll be doing your bit for the planet by recycling which I would say is very productive speaking of which if you want to increase your own productivity then why not sign up for a free two month trial at Skillshare the online learning community for creators where you can learn new skills on a huge variety of topics I've personally been following a Productivity course by Thomas Frank where he goes through managing tasks taking helpful notes getting better at email and a whole lot in addition and it's been super useful in getting far more done in a day like time management isn't actually one of my Forte's so thanks to Thomas and skill share you'll hopefully see more videos from me if you sign up using the link in the description you'll get as I said a two-month free trial for you to explore skill shares entire library of courses and they're on after it's only $10 a month to keep learning new skills to advance your life hobby or career so what are you waiting for get signed up to skill show using the link below and start learning today so that's it for this video I hope you've enjoyed it and I hope you go out there find some broken TVs and put them to some good use but other than that I'm Matt you've been watching DIY perks and I hope to see you next time good bye for now

Channel: DIY Perks

Views: 2,956,347

Keywords: daylight, light, tv, monitor, screen, light panel, led, illumination, diy, build, create, make, how-to

Id: 8JrqH2oOTK4

Length: 12min 50sec (770 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 09 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/mangopearapples]

Tried doing this. Turns out you need REALLY bright LED's with 97-99 CRI (95 would probably do too tbh) which cost around £25 per metre so while it looks good, it's not exactly cheap.

[u/[deleted]]

Cool project, could have definitely used this in my college apartment bedroom. Only window faced a brick wall two feet away :(

[u/nullthegrey]

I want skylights, but I also don't want to know giant holes in my roof. This looks like it could be a decent compromise..

[u/Pimmelman]

I might actually give this a go. I have a poorly lit garage with a large empty sloped inner roof. I also have access to a metric fuckton of old LCD panels at work ;)

[u/hands_on_tools]

This was cool. Cool idea, cool presenter. Cool.