Particle -> Old Laptop Monitor

I have a few Photon Cores and I am working up a project to display music for musical performances/practices.

I would like a device similar to a iPad but the screen as big as a sheet of paper. I have been doing research into what I could use as a screen. I am currently looking into using an old laptop screen as the display. However I am stuck currently on how to display onto it.
Basically I am asking for any ideas on how to display onto a large screen from a Photon core. Or any other screen Ideas you have. The photon would only store images of the music and display it. Creating the images would be on the server end. I am much more familiar with computer programming than with hardware so any help you can offer would be much appreciated.

what about a webpage on that server that gets data from the photon? you can then use any device with a browser.

The Server has all the music on it, It can then be downloaded by the Particle device and displayed on the monitor. The Photon can save music on it for offline use.

So you intent to drive the laptop display directly? If so, you’ll have to get a hold of the driver/controller and program that directly from the photon. That would be a considerable amount of work (if at all possible from the photon). Also, the photon has limited amount of memory, if you send it image files (png, jpg etc.) to display I think you would not have enough memory available.

My current plan is to output VGA out of the photon to a control board then to the monitor. The Image files will be saved on a SD card.

This really isn’t what a photon is for or good at. Driving the display is non trivial, the display would need a driver with a buffer the photon squirted images onto (this is how some of the graphical displays for arduino work, these displays are probably more powerful than the arduino driving them). The simplest solution would be to strap Pi’s to the back of cheap monitors, that would give you fully functional networked computers for cheap.
Laptop displays don’t typically use VGA or DVI natively, instead using LVDS, check this out for hardware hacking fun, (googled at random) https://hackaday.io/project/4177-lvds-laptop-display-interfacing

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That is a very interesting article!

The only function of Photon is to display Music from the SD Card on the display(s) and retrieve music from my server. Kinda like a Kindle except for sheet music.