Since the sound chip in my little Toughbook has shoddy Linux support, and the internal speaker sounds horrendous anyways, I figured I'd go real modern and use a bluetooth speaker for when needed.
No real dice, however, because the Bluetooth controller only has support for version 2 of the protocol, and no fancy codec support.
This led me to buy a BT 5.0 USB dongle from ASUS, with the plan to just chop it up to fit it behind one of the USB port cover flaps. This didn't work however, because of space constraints.
So, on to the next plan.. To find a USB bus internally and solder the damn thing in. It turned out that the original Bluetooth board was pretty damn easy to trace and hack up. The data bus was easy to spot. It's nearly always two parallell traces of equal length. I cut those traces heading to the old chip, prodded around for +5V and ground, and soldered in some wires.
The USB dongle conveniently has a footprint for a coax connector, one of which I salvaged from another old laptop expansion card and soldered onto the new board. It was then superglued onto the old board, and the wires were soldered across. There is always a bit of trial and error with USB buses when doing this, as you don't usually know which one is + and -. I had to flip the wires on this mod as it was not detected in the OS on the first go.
With that done I gooped some glue over the flimsy solder joints and wires to keep them all in place.
- before.jpeg (1.94 MiB) Viewed 18924 times
- stripped.jpeg (1.96 MiB) Viewed 18924 times
- layout.jpeg (1.76 MiB) Viewed 18924 times
- done.jpeg (1.72 MiB) Viewed 18924 times