Hi guys...A few weeks ago I purchased a Pronto NG3000 on E-Bay and eagerly awaited it's delivery to my home in Australia.....The girlie was even excited to see it turn up...unforunately...when I turned it on, I was WAY less than impressed with the light blue EL backlight. Something had to be done and done fast.

i searched the net and these forums to find some felow modders...but alas, nothing...looks like I was on my own. The Pronto never even made it into the lounge room...straight to te work bench for this little bugger!

To cut a long story short, two weeks later and alot of dremeling and a small amount of soldering I now have well lit screen which I must say has completely revamped the usability of the pronto.

I shan't go into all the nasty details, unless there is interest, but the basics went something like this.

Take the backlight lightguide assembly from one old laptop LCD screen add one pronto, 7 ultrabright LED's, a few surface mount resistors, trimpot and a mosfet, some 900Mah NiMh's and mix well with a Dremel.

The light guide from the laptop screen was cut to the size of the EL and inserted behind the LCD and the EL replaced as a backing to the light guide.

The 7 LED's fire into the right hand side of the lightguide which does a nice job of diffusing the light evenly across the screen (same as happens in an LCD screen on say a colour PDA) and provide the bright, even backlight for the screen. They are driven from a MOSFET (triggered from a line on the chip that controls the EL so it comes on and off as per the normal EL behaviour). The trimpot provides fine tuning of the brightness.

Needless to say this draws more power...and I am yet to use it in anger so I don't know the actual useful life...but in theory I expect it to be a number of hours.

The next 2 mods are...
1) Fit 4 x 2500Mah batteries...yes that dremel will get another workout.
2) Insert a small microswitch or PWM to allow progressive dimming of the backlight.

Any other suggestions?