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HDMI powered portable monitors.


lewmur

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Where are they???? :angry2: :angry2: Ever since the advent of small board PCs like the Pi and small Android tablets, I've been waiting for someone to come up with an HDMI powered portable monitor. Something in the 14" range or above. There are now USB monitors in that range, but they are only for Windows boxes.

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Guest LilBambi

There are converters for vga and/or hdmi/dvi to USB that might work for that. I just got one for an older Mac that has a bad video card and I need to get the data from the drive. I hope it will work. Not sure yet. It has only Windows drivers, but sometimes Macs just work for stuff, so gonna try it and see.

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The portable USB monitors are okay when you really need something bigger than your portable device screen but that is about it. Response time is noticeably slower and resolution limited to 1368*720. And the power drain is quite a bit.

 

If your device has USB3, the USB->HDMI adapters may do for you but they do not provide power.

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The portable USB monitors are okay when you really need something bigger than your portable device screen but that is about it. Response time is noticeably slower and resolution limited to 1368*720. And the power drain is quite a bit.

 

If your device has USB3, the USB->HDMI adapters may do for you but they do not provide power.

As I said in the OP, USB monitors don't work with Linux developer boards like the Pi or Odroid nor do they work with Android tablets. Useless for my purposes. I'm not worried about the power supply. High capacity battery packs are getting cheaper all the time. I carry several with me just as a matter of course.

Edited by lewmur
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Hello,

 

The HDMI spec only delivers +5VDC, 0.055A (55mA), compared to 0.5A (500mA) for USB 2.0 / 0.9A (900mA) for USB 3.0, so I wouldn't expect to see any kind of device powered by HDMI unless it was something like Bluetooth Low Energy or ZigBee for IoT applications.

 

On the other hand, the MHL interface allows USB-levels of power, and the superMHL specification (ratified in January 2016), supports 40W of power delivery for charging. I'm not sure if that would work going from the display source to the external monitor, though.

 

Regards,

 

Aryeh Goretsky

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  • 1 month later...

Turns out there is an app called DisplayLink in Android (and supposedly in Linux) that allows you to mirror the display on a USB monitor. You can't "extend" the display like it does in Windows, but you can mirror a small phone or tablet display to a larger monitor. I was able to buy a 15.6" USB monitor for about $60. The only problem is that if your device only has the micro USB connector, you can't charge and use the monitor at the same time. But you can, however, power the monitor itself from a charger or battery pack so that it doesn't take power from your device.

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