Touchscreen recovery! Yay!
I fixed my touchscreen last night. There were so many places it could have been broken: inside the USB pigtail, inside the VGA/USB attachment cable, inside the multiple-input hydra cable, inside the monitor itself, or even the touchscreen control board. It turned out to be inside the 20-pin connector that attaches to the monitor. A wire broke loose from the connector. Finding it was actually fairly easy, but required an exhaustive search with an ohm-meter (about 90 minutes of work).
In the process I learned more than I wanted to know about the monitor’s internals. And I found some useful and interesting sites.
The pinout diagram probably matched my cable exactly, but because I counted the DIN pins differently, I wound up having to trace all the USB pins. Having already voided the monitor warranty made that easier to do since I could go right inside the monitor to the touchkit controller card and trace from there. It helps to have mad soldering skilz, too.
A side note: I contacted the “store” that sold me the monitor to begin with to ask about getting another cable. I would have paid for it, even. But they told me to reseat connections and verify other things first. Didn’t offer any real “new cable” help at all. In their defense, though, they did get back to me within a day or so.
I also contacted Lilliput about the same thing. Lilliput China referred me to their US distributor. The US distributor still hasn’t contacted me.
With all the time-wasting these people did, I managed to fix the cable myself.
Once I had the monitor repaired I had to test it. To test it I had to install the carputer again. I trimmed some more plastic out of the way to make it easier and installed it all again. It only took about an hour, even though I had to pull it again to reseat the VGA card… I should get a real case someday.
Oh yeah — and I went ahead and wired the touchscreen monitor power to the Opus power supply while I was in there. I can check that off my “to do list”.