{"id":465499,"date":"2026-02-10T09:05:15","date_gmt":"2026-02-10T09:05:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/465499\/"},"modified":"2026-02-10T09:05:15","modified_gmt":"2026-02-10T09:05:15","slug":"upcycling-an-ipad-into-a-touchscreen-display-for-your-pc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/465499\/","title":{"rendered":"Upcycling An IPad Into A Touchscreen Display For Your PC"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Installing<\/a>Installing an RPi Pico board like it\u2019s a modchip. (Credit: Tucker Osman, YouTube)<\/p>\n

Although generally iPads tend to keep their resale value, there are a few exceptions, such as when you find yourself burdened with iCloud-locked devices. Instead of tossing these out as e-waste, you can still give them a new, arguably better purpose in life: an external display, with touchscreen functionality if you\u2019re persistent enough. Basically someone like [Tucker Osman], who spent the past months<\/a> on making the touchscreen functionality play nice in Windows and Linux.<\/p>\n

While newer iPads are easy enough to upcycle as an external display as they use eDP (embedded Display Port), the touch controller relies on a number of chips that normally are initialized and controlled by the CPU. Most of the time was thus spent on reverse-engineering this whole process, though rather than a full-depth reverse-engineering, instead the initialization data stream was recorded and played back.<\/p>\n

This thus requires that the iPad can still boot into iOS, but as demonstrated in the video it\u2019s good enough to turn iCloud-locked e-waste into a multi-touch display. The SPI data stream that would normally go to the iPad\u2019s SoC is instead intercepted by a Raspberry Pi Pico board which pretends to be a USB HID peripheral to the PC.<\/p>\n

If you feel like giving it a short yourself, there\u2019s the GitHub repository with details<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Thanks to [come2] for the tip.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Installing an RPi Pico board like it\u2019s a modchip. (Credit: Tucker Osman, YouTube) Although generally iPads tend to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":465500,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[49,48,61],"class_list":["post-465499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=465499"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465499\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/465500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=465499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=465499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=465499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}