CF-29 touchscreen swap the (semi) hard way

Got myself a new (to me) lid with a touchscreen. Must have been from a federal model though, it didn't have wifi antennae. Swapping the innards and bezel while keeping the antennae wires and back attached was a bit challenging, but it's all in and working now.

Drawing directly on the screen in Illustrator should prove entertaining... as should getting it calibrated and working in Linux.

 

You removed the touchscreen bezel from the original? Just curious why you didn't just swap entire assemblies.

 

Oh no, I removed everything but the back/wifi antennae. Bezel, screen etc. were all pulled as a unit from the computer after removing the back/antennae, but leaving the antennae wires connected to the computer and laying them back on the table behind the computer. I figured that either way I was going to have to disassemble the lid, either to transfer the antennae to the new lid, or to attach the back/antennae assembly to the new lid. Since I wasn't sure where that black wire was running to down inside the computer, I figured I'd just leave it and the white wire attached.

 

The antennas remove easily if the LCD unit, as a whole, is removes. It's just two screws for each black plactic cover and then they pull out along with the wires.

So did you physically pull out the touchscreen along with the adhesive? Or did you use new adhesive to install the touchscreen? Just curious.

 

Hey Toughbook, is that you in the Geico commercial about the ex-drill sargent as a therapist?

GEICO | Commercials -

I loved that ad! My idea of therapy for wimps.

 

I love when he throws the box of tissues at the guy.

Toughbook-Since I know you know the hardware better than most, I feel like I'm not explaining myself properly. The wifi antenna wires (on mine at least) are taped to the inside of the top half of the lid. So even if I had unhooked them from inside the main body of the computer, I would still have had to disassemble both lids so that I could move them to the other lid, as the other lid had no antennae in it.

 

It is not hard to swap the antenna wires, just cut the tape, pull out and place in new cabinet, then retape.

Also, even Federal Non-Wireless models had antennas installed, just no WLAN/BT/WWAN cards installed to use them.

 

Well I don't know what kind of unit this lid came from as I only received the lid. Wherever it came from it had a perfectly functional touchscreen but no antennae or wires. Just two black plugs blocking where the wires would have entered the lid.

(Just read in another thread that 500x500px is the max. Should be fixed now)




And as the black and white wire are taped to the same surface as is displayed in the first image, I felt it would be more work to unhook, untape, and pull the antennae and wires from the old lid and then reinsert, retape and reconnect to this one, than to just lay the counterpart to the part shown here back on the table and remove the remainder of the screen from the computer.

 

It looks like someone removed the antennas. Perhaps a department that wanted to have NO wifi allowed. I have seen units that were 'customized" by their own crew like this, but usually they just remove the wifi card. Perhaps this was a similar case.

 

Psycholist,
Great pictures.

 

Thanks Gork, I wish I'd photographed the entire process for others to reference since I would have liked to have had one available to me.

I asked the seller if he know and would share anything about the history of these. He was selling parts from somewhere around 3 to 5 CF-29s. So far no reply.