Hey all! I’ve got an old ASUS ROG GL503GE laptop with broken keyboard and LCD but the PCB is fine, but the replacements for these are not cheap. So instead, I plan to turn this into desktop by transplanting this to a working-in-progress 3D-printed case.

I started by removing the board completely and immediately looked for a way to boot without the chassis by connecting it to the external power supply through the DC adapter and jumping the power LED connector but to no avail.

Power LED Connector

Then, I tried reconnecting this LED connector to the LED board that is factory-embedded to the chassis along with the keyboard and pressing the power button. This still doesn’t let me boot because turns out the power button is part of the keyboard and thus needs to be connected first.

LED Board

I was finally able to make it boot only by reconnecting the seemingly keyboard connector back to the board, which didn’t surprise me because I had confirmed it could boot before I took it apart.

Keyboard Connector

Maybe it is just me who did not jump this correctly in the first place, but is my assumption that the power LED connector is the only one needed in theory to boot the system valid?

Suppose that my assumption is valid. Now, I still need to figure out a way to make this boot with an external power button connecting to the board via the ribbon cable shown above. I expected this would be similar to desktop front panel connector but I have been looking for this for a while and I couldn’t find any product or even the right search key to look for this. So, does anyone know the name of this connector? Assuming this is not ASUS OEM, if someone can point me to a specific product available on Amazon or Ebay, that will be super helpful.

Thanks a lot!

  • BillyBuerger@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I’m a little confused about why you are talking about the LEDs. The LEDs show the status of power and such but have nothing to do with turning power onto the device. The power button is the only thing you should need to be concerned with. The power button appears to be above the keyboard but I could see them running the wires through the keyboard. You suggest that if you plug the keyboard in then the power works. So if you can trace the power button back to which of the wires on that connector they go to, you can find out which wires are needed to turn the system on/off. But being a laptop, they like to use these small plastic ribbon cables which maybe there are some standard to but they often seem to be very specific for the one laptop they were made for. Not sure if you can easily find something that would plug in here and give you a more normal pair of wires you can connect to. I can’t say I’ve ever seen anything like that. If you’re careful, you could probably solder some small wires to the pins on the connector itself and skip the ribbon cable. Or maybe you could cut out all of the ribbon cable except the part that goes to the power button.

    I have a whole stack of old laptops I have plans for doing something with. I like the idea of using old rack mount network equipment and such and mounting the parts in there so I can mount them more easily than a laptop normally would and use them for random things. I’ve tested many of them working on my desk by connecting up the needed parts. But most of them have a separate connector for the button, some with the LEDs on the same board as the power button. I only ran into one old Dell that was stupid and had a hardware lock that would prevent it from booting unless the display itself was connected. Not sure why they would do something stupid like that. But I got around that by disconnecting the display controller from the display panel and that was enough to let it boot without the whole display. But I think it would still only show the boot screens to the no removed display and only after booting into Windows would an external display turn on. It was pretty crap so I don’t think that one ended up in the pile of parts for disposal. I have plenty of others that are more interesting.

    • loww7117@alien.topOPBEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      The LEDs show the status of power and such but have nothing to do with turning power onto the device.

      That makes sense. I’ve never dealt with a laptop before so I naively assumed that this is similar to a desktop where the power switch pins are typically next to the power LED pins and never within the keyboard connector. I originally thought that the power button is connected to the small LED daughterboard or something.

      So if you can trace the power button back to which of the wires on that connector they go to, you can find out which wires are needed to turn the system on/off.

      Yeah I will try doing my research online first to see if I can find out about this without having to somewhat destroy the chassis to get into the wiring (or hopefully by jumping the keyboard connector). Thanks a lot!

      I only ran into one old Dell that was stupid and had a hardware lock that would prevent it from booting unless the display itself was connected.

      This is pretty interesting. Thanks for sharing!