This is a story of triumph, heartbreak, redemption with a bit of stupidity mixed in.
I have an old Raspberry Pi Model A floating around my junk drawer that I wanted to find a good use for. While it isn't the fastest Pi out there anymore, it did have lots of life left in it and I wanted to do something useful with it.
That "something" turned out to be a little Internet of Things (IOT) device that tied into my Pi Aware installation to show a real time map of the aircraft flying around in my area, along with a real time radar view of the local weather. The information is displayed on a small 7 inch LCD screen that I bought off of ebay for around $30.
I will provide full step by step details on how I built this neat little gizmo at a later date, but this story is more about what happened after I just finished building it.
After testing and installing the electronics into the custom case that I built for this project, the final step was to install the back cover of the case. The back was built as a friction fit, so it took a bit of force (not a lot) to fit the back into the case.
Even though I took a lot of care in protecting the screen, when I put the new toy in its place of honor and plugged it in, I had a very ominous black line running down the center of the screen.
I had cracked it! After kicking myself, I immediately went back onto ebay and ordered another screen to replace it.
Since it'll take a good month for the replacement to come, I decided to keep using the bad screen in the meantime.
The screen was kept on 24 hours a day, and I hadn't really paid much attention to it until a couple of days later when I wanted to see if there was any rain headed my way.
That's when I got a shock....
The screen seemed to be repairing itself!
