I am so close now with getting the LCD working with the Pi Zero. I got the desoldering tools in the mail, so I went ahead and desoldered the parts I wanted and cut the board down. Unfortunately while doing so, I broke off a few pads. So the next step was looking at a schematic and figuring out which connections needed to be connected between the Pi and the LCD. I meticulously added wire and did repairs on it and tested each with a multimeter and then soldered wire between the Pi and the LCD.

I then went ahead and downloaded a more recent version of Raspbian and installed it on an SD card, hooked the Pi up to my TV and finished the install. I ran a script from Adafruit to set up displaying the output to the LCD and rebooted. It was black. I realized I forgot a ground wire and added that, but still no connection. I removed the LCD extension cable and plugged the LCD directly in the board and it was white. I fiddled with the extension cable and finally got everything the correct side so now the LCD is displaying white. I booted up again and it goes from white to black (but still illuminated) during the process, so that's where I'm at. I also double checked all connections from the raspberry pi to connection points on the board and everything checked out fine and the touchscreen moves the mouse, so it's definitely only the display portion not working.

On another note, it was announced that the Hackaday Super Conference tickets, so I went ahead and snagged an early bird ticket since hardware hacking is one of my favorite activities. Speaking of which, I think I'm going to change the name of this section due to it being more generalized. Probably electronics or maybe hardware hacking or something else if I think of something better. Robotics was just a little too narrow.