USB Bluetooth Without Sacrificing A Port

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.

13 thoughts on “USB Bluetooth Without Sacrificing A Port

  1. 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-

  2. #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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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!

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