Cutting a laptop screen in half is harder and easier than it looks

In the world of hardware hacking, sometimes you spend an awful lot of time debugging a problem, only to find a simple solution that was in front of you the whole time. [Zack Freedman] got a lot of it when building the Optigon V2, a modified Epson Moverio portable display that he uses as a teleprompter in all of his videos. He prefers to have the teleprompter on his left eye only, but the new version of the Moverio would turn off both sides if one is disconnected, so [Zack] needed a workaround.

Seeking help from above, [Zack] requested developer documentation for the display module from Epson, but was denied because he was not a manufacturer or product developer. Luckily, a downloadable spec sheet on Epson's website had plenty of the information he needed. An STM32 monitored the temperature of each display module on a pair of independent I2C interfaces and shut down everything if it couldn't connect to either. This led [Zack] to attempt to spoof the I2C signals with an ATmega328, but he couldn't keep up with the I2C bus at 400kHz.

However, upon reviewing his logic analyzer logs, [Zack] discovered that the STM32 never talked to both display modules simultaneously, even though it was able to. Both screens use the same I2C address, so [Zack] could just connect the two I2C buses together with a simple interface board, causing the left screen to "spoof" the signals from the right screen.

Portable displays need sophisticated optics to be practical, you can't just stick an OLED on your face. Two other interesting projects by [Zack] are his modular mechanical keyboard and the 3D printed storage system Gridfinity.