The UK's Matthew Perks has been running a YouTube channel for about five years, where he walks viewers through the ins and outs of making their own gadgets – from a glass speaker to a smartphone projector and more. For his latest project, he's rescued some broken televisions and computer monitors and turned them into artificial daylight panel lighting.
Perks points out that many modern TVs and computer monitors will have some sort of display panel out front, and a backlight setup behind it. And it's this backlight element that's used to offer artificial lighting that looks like "real daylight on a cloudy day."
The handy YouTuber first removed the back panel from a thrown-out TV and stripped out all of the metal brackets and electronics. After removing the metal border on the display panel, he popped out the LCD panel to the front as it wasn't needed for this project.
This left the backlight array, which in this case was made up of a light diffusion layer, a Fresnel layer, another diffuser and an acrylic back panel dotted with mini diffusers. The backlight array itself was made up of a bank of LEDs, though some older units may be home to compact fluorescent tubes.
Perks removed the LEDs from the frame as he felt that the strip wasn't particularly easy to power and replaced them with a favored option of LED strips. Then it was just a case of returning the removed layers to the frame, though he recommends not placing the final diffuser layer over the Fresnel layer as going without should result in a more realistic daylight effect.
The final steps were to replace the original border with a set of cut aluminum lengths, for a professional-looking finish, and extending the power cables from the LED strip, covering them and popping a plug on the end. The panel was then ready for its lighting debut.
All of the unused components from the broken TVs and monitors were taken to a recycling point for proper disposal, and the new lighting solutions were used to add a faux skylight to a dim stairway, freshen up a living room and create a false window in a wall.
Perks walks through the repurposing in the video below.
Source: DIY Perks