USB Bluetooth without sacrificing a port

posted Oct 22nd 2005 11:00am by Eliot Phillips
filed under: tablet pcs hacks

bluetooth

Myriam a.k.a. [tnkgrl] decided that the the Averatec 1050 laptop was sorely in need of some Bluetooth and was tired of losing a port to a USB dongle. The AV1050 reports 3 usb ports in the device manager, but only features two external ports. She disassembled the laptop and went looking for the third port. The end result is 2 fully functioning USB ports and internal Bluetooth. There’s enough detail in the post you should be able to pull this off with other laptops as well.

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Comments [13]

Reader Comments

great work! and first post!

Posted at 11:15 am on Oct 22nd, 2005 by Joel

good job. I have an old Dell 8500 that has 2 external usb ports but 4 show up on the system manager. I think I might try this with them. THanks!

Posted at 11:56 am on Oct 22nd, 2005 by warchild

lol, my dell 4500 says 10 usb ports when only 4 are outside!

Posted at 2:54 pm on Oct 22nd, 2005 by weirdguy0101

Nice work. I should have done something like that with my Media frame, rather than routing a hub back into the battery bay.

Posted at 4:06 pm on Oct 22nd, 2005 by george

Wow… You posted my hack! Thanks Since you’ve misspelled my handle (it’s tnkgrl) you’re welcome to update this post with my name (it’s Myriam). And yes this is proof that there are girl hackers out there too -grin-

Posted at 5:09 pm on Oct 22nd, 2005 by tnkgrl

internal bluetooth is cool but would a USB hub work for the more faint of heart?

Posted at 5:20 pm on Oct 22nd, 2005 by ez

#6, I considered it, but the Averatec 1050 is a small, light, (and cheap) ultra-portable notebook (10.6″ screen) without a lot of space inside. Beyond the space limitations, adding a hub inside in addition to the Bluetooh module would require traces to be cut (to one of the existing 2 USB ports) and would draw more power.

I like that this mod can be undone, and I like the 4+ hour battery life of this machine. Besides this hack is quite elegant
FYI, I dual boot Windows XP Pro and Mac OSX for Intel on this machine.

Posted at 6:15 pm on Oct 22nd, 2005 by tnkgrl

Averatec has been doing that with wifi for years.

Posted at 4:57 pm on Oct 23rd, 2005 by Jaspel

In the case of the mac bluetooth she has linked, you don’t always have to loose the usb connection on the outside. All you need is one of those small usb hubs, the ones that take one port and make them two. Then you cut the traces, solder the input to the hub to the trace, the first output to the bluetooth, and the second output to the usb connector.

Posted at 6:59 pm on Oct 23rd, 2005 by CDE

girl hackers are hot.

Posted at 11:18 am on Oct 24th, 2005 by Tired2

I just did this to my laptop, works great. You can read about it here: http://tomthegeek.blogspot.com/2005/12/adding-internal-bluetooth.html

Posted at 1:07 pm on Dec 12th, 2005 by TomTheGeek

i feel empowered

Posted at 11:59 am on Aug 7th, 2006 by reese

I wonder how to do that, but it seems that the link is broken. I saw many articles explaining how to do that but sacrificing a port, so I finally just prefer to plug the dogle outside, then I always have the possibility to unplug it and use the port. But, if there is really a way to don’t sacrifing a port, I’m willing to know it!

Posted at 3:16 am on May 22nd, 2008 by Jonathan