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Squeezing bluetooth into an Inspiron 630mLast updated: 3rd February 2006Revision history03/02/2006 Added interface piccies 22/01/2006 Initial revision Why?Because those lovely people who develop the Dell web site didn't give me the option to have it even though it was specified as a build-time option in the accompanying spiel.This is no real problem, just something I feel I could do with :-) So, first a bit of detective work... The riddle of the connectorless USB busThe 630m has four high-speed USB2.0 connectors split into two pairs - one pair on the right-hand side of the chassis next to the optical drive bay and one on the rear panel adjacent to the power connector.On issuing an lsusb under linux, you can see that there are five USB busses in total: Bus 005 Device 001: ID 0000:0000 Bus 004 Device 001: ID 0000:0000 Bus 003 Device 001: ID 0000:0000 Bus 002 Device 001: ID 0000:0000 Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000Lovely. So, at best there's going to be one spare bus if you assume that each port has its own channel. With a bit of experimentation, it turns out that the ports on the side are bus 5 and the ones on the rear bus 4. Hmmm - this means that there are three busses unaccounted for. Another of these can be attributed to the ExpressCard slot that has both a PCI Express lane and a USB2.0 channel presented to it. Not having an ExpressCard to test with, this has to remain theory for the moment. So, this leaves two USB busses unaccounted for. Time to go searching... Pull it to bits!Two minutes and a Philips screwdriver later and the Mini-PCI cover on the underside of the laptop has been removed. It would appear that I may have struck lucky in that the Intel Pro Wireless 2200 card, modem AND what looks suspiciously like the header for a bluetooth module and space for it to fit all reside here as can be seen in the photo below:
Now, if I was designing a laptop and wanted a suitably easy method of taking a comodity bluetooth chipset and shoehorning it into my design, it's a good bet that I'd do it by taking one of the spare USB busses and dropping it onto a multi-way connector for the bluetooth module. Because it's internal it doesn't need a stock USB connector (in fact due to space constraints a full-size connector couldn't really be used anyway) and it would also allow for status feedback (such as the bluetooth activity light on the top panel) without having to do clever things in software to switch the lamp. What should be thereAfter a bit of Googling and reading between the lines on Dell's driver download site, it would appear that the 600m has a Dell TruMobile 300 bluetooth adaptor (bluetooth v1.0 and v1.2) while the 630m has a Dell TruMobile 350 (v1.0, v1.2 and v2.0).From what I can tell, the modules have the same form factor and connector, so that would imply that they are interchangable, however I can not confirm this! More Googling reveals that the TruMobile 3x0 series is indeed USB based, so this would imply that as well as the standard TruMobile module, you could probably hack a generic USB Bluetooth dongle to attatch to the header provided by the Dell. So, two options then: The Hard WayAs ever, a standard set of tools are needed:
As it's a standard USB interface, I'm sure you could probe the pins, find the appropriate Vcc, ground, +data and -data lines, rip apart a £3 eBay bluetooth dongle and solder the whole lot together without too much hassle. The Easy WayHowever, a bit more digging on eBay reveals that you can quite easily buy the TruMobile 300 and 350 parts from various vendors. The 300 is as cheap as chips, but the 350 was appreciably more expensive (around £30 from a UK seller). I deciced to go down the the expensive route as (A) it is the module specified to go with this particular model, and (B) this thing is less than a month old and the last thing I want to go and do is blow up the Integrated Controller Hub within four weeks of buying it!I bought my TruMobile 350 module from This eBay Shop - it would appear that you can buy an entire Dell laptop in component form from them! Very friendly seller and quick delivery, too. Two days later the rather diminutive module turns up and initially I thought I'd been sent an empty envelope: This module is so small I missed the fact it was actually in there! It's around 30mm long, 14mm wide and 4mm deep and simply smaps on to the end of the interface cable. As can be seen from the (yet to be posted) following photograph, it's not exactly a snug fit. I guess I'm missing the appropriate mounting tranklement to secure it properly, so in the mean time it has been fitted in true Disgruntled Goat style with the use of a folded up post-it note. :-) As a little safety note, during this operation I removed the power supply and battery just in case: you never know what might happen otherwise! Does it work?Turn on the power and two satisfying things happen: firstly, the magic smoke contained within all pieces of electrical equipment did not escape from my laptop, and secondly the until-now inert bluetooth indicator lit up - appropriately - blue.Booting into Linux and issuing an lsusb now gives the following: # lsusb Bus 005 Device 001: ID 0000:0000 Bus 004 Device 001: ID 0000:0000 Bus 003 Device 002: ID 413c:8103 Dell Computer Corp. Wireless 350 Bluetooth Bus 003 Device 001: ID 0000:0000 Bus 002 Device 001: ID 0000:0000 Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000so it would appear to work! Yay! A few commands later: # emerge kdebluetooth # rc-update add bluetooth default battery # /etc/init.d/bluetooth startand we're cooking with gas. I now have a nice, convenient method of getting piccys from the passable 1.2Mpixel camera on my Nokia 6680 to the machine without faffing around with cables. Take a snap, choose "Send -> Via Bluetooth", pick the machine from the list and Robert is your Mother's brother:    The photo of the bluetooth indicator above was taken with my 6680 then sent to the laptop via bluetooth just to prove it works :-) This page was last updated: 3rd February 2006 at 1:16pm UTC |
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