Category Archives: Electrical/Electronic

Convert a DVI-I connector to DVI-D

Electrical/Electronic, , ,

I love my little Raspberry Pi computer, but wasn’t using it much because it only has HDMI and composite video out. The monitor on my desk doesn’t have HDMI, so I was looking for an HDMI-to-DVI converter. At the local flea market, I stumbled a lovely little adapter which I got for a dollar. It appeared to have a jack appropriate for an HDMI cable on one side, and the male side of a DVI plug on the other. My plan was to plug this into the monitor, then run a standard HDMI cable to the Raspberry.

But when I got home, I found that the DVI end would not plug into my monitor. I couldn’t figure out why not, as it looked like there were 24 signal pins on both. Then I noticed that there were actually 4 extra pins on the adapter around the spade contact. The internet said that these were analog pins, so I decided to take a chance and try to convert the adapter to fit into my monitor. Nothing to lose; even if I destroyed the adapter, it was already unusable in its present state.

RemoveAnalogPins
First, I removed the 4 analog pins around the spade contact. Others on the internet have either ground these down, or cut them off, but I found that I was able to simply pull them out with a needlenose pliers.
MachineGroundKey
On the analog version of DVI, the spade contact is slightly wider than on the digital version. In other tutorials, people have simply cut this contact down with a diagonal cutter, but I found it neater to trim it to size with a rotary diamond burr.

Incidentally, it works great!