m2

5 Articles

Thinkpad 13 Gets NVMe Support With Three Jumpers

September 29, 2024 by 17 Comments

Hardware restrictions can be unreasonable, and at times, it can be downright puzzling just how arbitrary they are. Such is the case with the Lenovo ThinkPad 13 — it’s got a M.2 M-key socket, yet somehow only supports SATA SSDs in it, despite the CPU being new enough to support both SATA and NVMe effortlessly. [treble] got one of those laptops from a recycler, and decided to figure out just what this laptop’s deal is.

Armed with schematics, she and her friend looked at the M.2 implementation. The slot’s schematic sure looked ready to support either kind of drive, a surprising find. Here’s the catch — Lenovo only populated components for SATA drive support. All you need to switch from SATA to NVMe support is three magnet wire jumpers, or zero-ohm 0402 resistors, and voila; you can now use the significantly cheaper kind of M.2 drives in your ThinkPad.

All is documented, and [treble] even mentions that you could increase the link speed by adding more PCIe lane capacitors that Lenovo, again, left unsoldered. UEFI already has the modules needed to boot from NVMe, too – it’s an outright upgrade for your laptop with just a soldering iron’s touch required, and a reminder that proprietary tech will screw you over for entirely arbitrary reasons. Now, it’s not just laptops you can upgrade with a few resistors — same goes for certain electric cars.

Four M.2 cards of different sizes on a desk surface

M.2 For Hackers – Cards

November 7, 2022 by 17 Comments

Last time, I’ve explained everything you could want to know if you wanted to put an M.2 socket onto your board. Today, let’s build M.2 cards! There’s a myriad of M.2 sockets out there that are just asking for a special card to be inserted into it, and perhaps, it’s going to be your creation that fits.

Why Build Cards?

Laptops and other x86 mainboards often come with M.2 slots. Do you have a free B-key slot? You can put a RP2040 and bunch of sensors on a B-key PCB as an experimental platform carried safely inside your laptop. Would you like to do some more advanced FPGA experiments? Here’s a miniscule FPGA board that fits inside your laptop and lets you play with PCIe on this same laptop – the entire setup having a super low footprint. Are you looking for an extra PCIe link because you’re reusing your laptop as a home server? Again, your WiFi slot will provide you with that. Want to get some PCIe out of a SteamDeck? Building a M-key 2230 card seems to be your only hope! Continue reading “M.2 For Hackers – Cards” →

M.2 For Hackers – Connectors

November 3, 2022 by 9 Comments

In the first M.2 article, I’ve described real-world types and usecases of M.2 devices, so that you don’t get confused when dealing with various cards and ports available out there. I’ve also designed quite a few M.2 cards and card-accepting adapters myself. And today, I’d like to tell you everything you need to know in order to build M.2 tech on your own.

There’s two sides to building with M.2 – adding M.2 sockets onto your PCBs, and building the PCBs that are M.2 cards. I’ll cover both of these, starting with the former, and knowing how to deal with M.2 sockets might be the only thing you ever need. Apart from what I’ll be describing, there’s some decent guides you can learn bits and pieces from, like the Sparkfun MicroMod design guide, most of which is MicroMod-specific but includes quite a few M.2 tips and tricks too.

First, Let’s Talk About The Y-Key

What could you do with a M.2 socket on your PCB? For a start, many tasty hobbyist-friendly SoMs and CPUs now have a PCIe interface accessible, and if you’re building a development board or a simple breakout, an M.2 socket will let you connect an NVMe SSD for all your high-speed low-power storage needs – many Raspberry Pi Compute Module mainboards have M.2 M-key sockets specifically for that, and there’s NVMe support in the RPi firmware to boot. Plus, you can always plug a full-sized PCIe adapter or an extender into such a socket and connect a PCIe network card or other much-needed device – even perhaps, an external GPU! However, as much as PCIe-equipped SoMs are tasty, they’re far from the only reason to use M.2 sockets.

Continue reading “M.2 For Hackers – Connectors” →

M.2 For Hackers – Expand Your Laptop

October 27, 2022 by 55 Comments

You’ve seen M.2 cards in modern laptops already. If you’re buying an SSD today, it’s most likely an M.2 one. Many of our laptops contain M.2 WiFi cards, the consumer-oriented WWAN cards now come in M.2, and every now and then we see M.2 cards that defy our expectations. Nowadays, using M.2 is one of the most viable ways for adding new features to your laptop. I have found that the M.2 standard is quite accessible and also very hackable, and I would like to demonstrate that to you.

If you ever searched the Web trying to understand what makes M.2 tick, you might’ve found one of the many confusing articles which just transcribe stuff out of the M.2 specification PDF, and make things look more complicated than they actually are. Let’s instead look at M.2 real-world use. Today, I’ll show you the M.2 devices you will encounter in the wild, and teach you what you need to know to make use of them. In part 2, I will show you how to build your own M.2 cards and card-accepting devices, too!

Well Thought-Out, Mostly

You can genuinely appreciate the M.2 standard once you start looking into it, especially if you have worked with mPCIe devices for some amount of time. mPCIe is what we’ve been using for all these years, and it gradually became a mish-mash of hardly-compatible pinouts. As manufacturers thought up all kinds of devices they could embed, you’d find hacks like mSATA and WWAN coexistence extensions, and the lack of standardization is noticeable in things like mPCIe WWAN modems as soon as you need something like UART or PCM. The M.2 specification, thankfully, accounted for all of these lessons.

Continue reading “M.2 For Hackers – Expand Your Laptop” →

First Look: Macchina M2

February 21, 2017 by 49 Comments

In the past few years, we’ve seen a growth in car hacking. Newer tools are being released, which makes it faster and cheaper to get into automotive tinkering. Today we’re taking a first look at the M2, a new device from the folks at Macchina.

The Macchina M1 was the first release of a hacker friendly automotive device from the company. This was an Arduino compatible board, which kept the Arduino form factor but added interface hardware for the protocols most commonly found in cars. This allowed for anyone familiar with Arduino to start tinkering with cars in a familiar fashion. The form factor was convenient for adding standard shields, but was a bit large for using as a device connected to the industry standard OBD-II connector under the dash.

The Macchina M2 is a redesign that crams the M1’s feature set into a smaller form factor, modularizes the design, and adds some new features. With their Kickstarter launching today, they sent us a developer kit to review. Here’s our first look at the device.

Continue reading “First Look: Macchina M2” →