Replacing the 3.7" Zaurus screen by a 4" screen

Credits

Thanks to Mjolinor for giving me a display-less C700 for experimentation.
High resolution pictures are available

Part 1: Making the screen fit

The basic idea behind this hack is to replace a clamshell 3.7" screen by a 4" transreflective screen from a SL-6000.

Due to financial constraints, the hack will not be attempted on one of the newest clamshells (SLC-3000, SLC-3100, SLC-3200) unless you are willing to offer me one.

The first problem encountered is the different size for the screen connectors of the SL-6000 screen, as you can see on this picture of a SL-6000 screen next to a SLC-700 motherboard with the apparent screen connectors.

These two will never match

I then realised the C700 I was offered was missing the screen part, where there could be electronic or connectors with different sizes. Yet I could dig a picture of a SLC-700 display and learn more about it:

jchung888 Zaurus
display As you can see, there are 2 boards on each side of the screen. The left board seems to be an inverter board. Looks like the connector size is closer to the SL-6000 connector. However, There is an additional 2 wires connector going to the right hand part, which is embedded inside the SL-6000 screen as you can see on the zoom of the connectors.

The 2 wires is integrated inside
the connector Therefore my next step is to find someone with a broken C7xx display who could donate the full display, to try to extract the flat connector and the two side boards.

I will then attempt to connect the SL-6000 display to the side-boards, but it should fail, due to the 2 wires working differently on each model. I have to study the broken C7xx display to see how these 2 wires work - maybe the connector is fully identical, and the 2 wires seen on the picture is just a convenient way to bring say power to the right side board?

The first option is to cut open the SL-C7xx screen, extract its FPC cable, do the same to the SL-6000 screen and put inside the SL-C7xx FPC cable.

An alternative could be to try and cut the SL-6000 connector extreme end: if the pins have the same function and are in the same order, considering the 2 wires are on the extreme end of one side, they could be cut and wired to the right hand board.

Yet there is another problem then: since the connectors come from different sides of the screen, they may never reach the left and right side boards if the flat cables are too short.