tnkgrl

9 Articles

Modding The Acer Aspire One With Bluetooth

August 14, 2008 by 9 Comments


[tnkgrl], a regular around here, is at it again. This time she has modded an Acer Aspire One subnotebook to have internal Bluetooth. She’s released part 1 of a multi part tutorial on beefing up the Aspire One. In this part, she covers disassembly, adding more RAM, and adding the Bluetooth hardware. She suggests that you look at her Bluetooth install on an Asus 701 to find more information as the process is nearly identical.

Part 2 of the tutorial is going to cover upgrading the SSD to a 1.8″ PATA hard drive and putting it back together.

Flipstart HSDPA Mod

June 6, 2008 by 3 Comments


Our friend [tnkgrl] has successfully added HSDPA to a Vulcan Flipstart. The Flipstart is a palmtop Windows machine with 1.1GHz Pentium M, 512MB RAM, 30GB hard drive, and an EVDO option. Before starting, you need to come up with a mini-PCI Express HSDPA card. Instead of trying for a random bare mini-PCIe card on eBay, she purchased an unlocked AT&T Sierra Wireless Aircard 875U USB dongle. Inside of the dongle is a battery, SIM slot, and a mini-PCI Express card. The Flipstart lid comes off with just a few screws and the card drops into place. Even though the antenna isn’t tuned for all the possible bands you should still get good signal most of the time. The best part of this mod is that it doesn’t require any obvious modification, so your warranty will be intact… as far as anyone can tell. Embedded below is the video of the easy swap. In the past, she added HSDPA to the OQO 02, which definitely takes a lot more work.

Continue reading “Flipstart HSDPA Mod” →