iMac mid-2010 DisplayPort Monitor Conversion

For a while now, I’ve been using an mid-2010 iMac 27” as an external display for my Hackintosh using Target Display Mode. It worked really well but the fact that I needed to run a machine to do nothing but be an additional screen bothered me a bit, seemed like a waste. As well as that, when you wake your mahcine from sleep, Target Display Mode often needs to be re-estsablished and that can be a little annoying.

After spending a fair bit of time on Google, I found the eBay store “elecrealm”. These guys sell a DisplayPort Board specifically to enable you to use the panel from the 27” iMac as a stand alone display. This baord is specifically for the iMac 2009 / 2010 models which are LM270WQ1-SD A2 and LM270WQ1-SD C2 panels (amongst others I believe). The only thing you need to find is a power brick that provides 19V and 4.74a to drive the display.

I ripped the guts out of the Mac (Logic board, HDD, optical, fans) to leave a nice empty shell within which to fit the circuit baords and cabling.

Extra bits

For a bit of extra fun I did some research into whether or not I can could rewire the FaceTime HD Camera and SD Card reader to be used as external devices. Turns out, they are both simply USB 2.0 compatible and it was simply a matter of matching up the 4 coloured USB cables with the 4 random coloured Apple cables and soldering them together. The mapping is:

Thanks to this tonymacOSX thread.

My BIG mistake was not lookking into how to hook up the Microphone… so that will be a project for another day.

@cd