As of today, this project has been online for 1.5 month and already has 26 people following and received 8 skulls. That is pretty awesome regards how incomplete this weekend project is. I would like to look at this project as a "Proof of concept" and not a project where I go from design to manufacturing a finished product.

I managed to make a LCD cape out of a digital photo frame with minimal external hardware and to a very low cost, but not without some shortcoming. Before I put this project aside, I could like to name a few of them and how to (possibly) solve those problems.

First off is the need of voltages generation for the panel (VGH, VGL, AVCC, VCOM) and backlight. I used the old driver board to drive the panel and saved tons of work and at no expense, but it's certainly not a pretty solution.
For a neater solution, I can use Ti's TPS6510x. It's a "Triple output LCD supply with linear regulator and VCOM buffer" that has a 1.6 MHz switching frequency and offer many other features like fault detection (except TPS65101) and <1% output voltage accuracy. Ti's TPS61080 is a wildly used for LCD backlight application and is fairly simple to use.

The next thing is touch functionality and it can be fixed by adding a touch panel. Capacitive touch panel for 8" 4:3 panel is nowhere to be found, but luckily there is many resistive ones out there in the wild (Ebay). Resistive touch use 4 AN input while capacitive use I2C bus plus one interrupt signal and both type is supported in the latest kernel.

The last thing I want to talk about is noise immunity and the need for a buffer IC. My answer is no, at least not for this panel anyway. I tried to replicate the worst case for a poor LCD panel (50 cm long wiring and wraping around the old driver board (2 boost converter) without a buffer IC). Everything works fine and the picture is as crispy as it can get. Color wise its 16 bit color so that's what you get. For people who feel like they need more than 16 bit, there is nothing to stop them from using up to 24 bit in exchange for some IO pins.