Man wields soldering iron, welds eight new devices into Eee PC
Mother of all mods?
You've got to admire Ivan Cover's soldering ability if not his ability to work out how and then cram no fewer than eight extra components into his Asus Eee PC.
He also upgraded the tiny laptop's 802.11b/g Wi-Fi to 802.11n, but that's more about replacing an existing component with a new one rather than adding the functionality in the first place.
In addition to that, Ivan's fitted a USB hub, a GPS receiver with its antenna, a Bluetooth module, a second SDHC card slot, a Flash drive, a power switch, an FM transmitter and a modem.
Ivan Cover's Eee PC modifications: all done and... they fit
Many of the bits were simply off-the-shelf cheap peripherals stripped of their plastic cases, USB connectors and the like and wired into the Eee.
Ivan's got full details of the modifications on his website. Even if you don't fancy pulling apart your own Eee and prodding it with a soldering iron, Ivan's got a stack of pics of the disassembled laptop, circuit board maps and so on for all you armchair modders.
Ivan's running Windows XP on his Eee, which makes driver support a little less hit and miss than the machine's own version of Linux.
COMMENTS
@yeah, right
Are you still trying continuing with your one-man-campaign against the Eee? If what you described of the keyboard was the norm on these things then people would be complaining about it *everywhere*, so either you're lying or the one you used was badly abused before you got to try it.
And also....
He managed to hide 25kg of cemtex under the board.
Wow.. although a bit over the top
Great mods - provided you pick and choose which ones to install, otherwise it gets into laptop pricing territory. As it is, if you're going to void the warranty, a second hand Thinkpad X40 becomes more than a minor possibility..
All well and good...
but does it blend?
and where is the "does it blend" icon!
Driver Support
I completely mis-read this line in the article:
"Ivan's running Windows XP on his Eee, which makes driver support a little less hit and miss than the machine's own version of Linux."
Have you actually read the guys Wiki page and seen how much faffing was needed trying to alter Windows drivers from the wrong sources to get this thing working? In my experience, Plug and Play actually works in Linux because it can control a chip and not just the one with the given manufacturer ID.
I think that the only item on that list I'd be unsure about in Linux is the GPS receiver, but since it's running via a USB serial port, I can't imagine any difficulties there either.
You'd really rather hack a Windows driver than plug it in and use it??
