When SmallPC first started making waterproof display PCs back in the early 2000s, we would enclose a monitor with its controller board inside our waterproof chassis and then connect an internal fanless PC via VGA. So you basically had a monitor and a PC living together inside the same chassis but you could still control the monitor independently of the PC.
Of course, this sometimes led to all kinds of fun things like sync issues between the PC and monitor, we had to enclose the OSD buttons somewhere and occasionally the monitor would turn itself off or go to sleep.
Fast forward a decade or so and all industrial PCs and HMIs were using LVDS to the motherboard for a seamless experience. This is the standard still for industrial HMIs – the chipset allows direct control of the backlight through Windows’ brightness slider and your display syncs instantly on startup and goes off when the PC goes off.
BUT – every so often it would be handy to use your waterproof display PC both as a PC with touch AND as a secondary monitor to some other PC (for example, a tablet or a laptop).
This is what we recently did for a customer: the internal PC connects to the video controller board of the monitor portion via DisplayPort which still leaves you HDMI and VGA as inputs to be used for a different PC. The front-mounted OSD keypad allows full control of the display so you can dim it, turn it off and select the color scheme and the input independently of the PC.
So if you have limited space (on a boat for example) you can have one sunlight readable display PC that is both the PC running whatever navigation software you need AND you can use the same unit as a secondary display for your laptop.
Just another example of the kind of custom solutions SmallPC can create for your project. No request is a strange request, so don’t be shy and ask!