HP Mini 2140 Netbook gets aftermarket Bluetooth without breaking the bank

I’m quite satisfied with the netbook I’m using at the moment: HP Mini 2140, with a reasonable 2GB RAM and beautiful brushed aluminium chassis. Even though it has a screen people would call "low resolution", I’d say it is very legible. The only thing missing – and one I’d come to love – is Bluetooth connectivity that I had with my Lenovo V100 laptop.

So, I went and bought the module, cracked the netbook open and added Bluetooth, all without spending truckloads of money.

Why Bluetooth?

Why do I like Bluetooth so much? I use it to connect my Microsoft Bluetooth Mobile Keyboard 6000 (it’s a fantastic piece of hardware), my Microsoft Bluetooth Notebook Mouse 5000 and my Microsoft IntelliMouse for Bluetooth. The best thing is, I don’t need to attach any dongles, and when I have everything paired, docking the netbook while working on a desk simply involves putting it down and connecting the external monitor. No USB cables to muck around with.

Bluetooth PAN is also great way to get wireless Internet tethering from my phone, and much more power efficient than using Wi-Fi tethering.

Getting the parts

The first step was to see what I needed to add Bluetooth to the netbook. HP’s specifications say Bluetooth v2.0 was indeed an option for this particular netbook. So it means all I needed to do was find the Bluetooth module’s part number, order it and install it. I love it when PC manufacturers publish the maintenance and service guides for the laptops, because it just makes life much easier to perform DIY post-warranty service.

To my horror, ordering HP’s official Bluetooth module costs an arm and a leg, and it doesn’t even include the connection cable between the system board and the module! So I looked for alternatives on eBay.

It was soon obvious that there are overwhelmingly many different Bluetooth modules for laptops. In general, manufacturers design their computers so that the parts are interchangeable between devices. So I searched for "HP Bluetooth Module" and went through the list. Eventually I found a listing for Broadcom BCM2046 Bluetooth 2.1 module plus the cable for roughly AUD$20. Sweet! What’s more, the listing claims that this part was compatible with the HP Mini 2133 and 2140 netbooks. The fact that it also came with 4 screws was rather curious, because the HP Mini 2140 only uses double-sided adhesives to attach the module.

Anyhow, I was willing to give that a try. The most important thing is that the module was compatible (that I didn’t know in advance; it just should work and looks about right), and that the cable had the correct adapters (I had to take the eBay seller’s word for it).

Installing the module

Receiving the goods after about a week and a half, it was time to perform the surgery and disassemble the netbook. First the keyboard came off, exposing the hard drive and the DDR2 memory.

Unfortunately for the HP Mini 2140, the Bluetooth module was located under the palmrest and left of the touchpad. So it’ll take a little more effort to access it. It turns out that even though my netbook didn’t come with Bluetooth, the double-sided adhesive that holds the Bluetooth module in place actually came with the system board. Excellent. That makes my job so much easier.

Final thoughts

For for a mere $20, my little HP Mini-Note 2140 netbook now has Bluetooth! What’s more, the particular module that I bought was Broadcom BCM2046, which is Bluetooth v2.1. Had I gone with official HP parts, not only would it have costed me more than 5x more money, it was only Bluetooth 2.0. Not that there’s very much difference, but 2.1 is meant to give higher data rates and use less power.

Tech entrepreneurial questions? Ask TVC!

This semester, I’m doing a entrepreneurial course as a finale to my 5 years undergrad at uni. The course is run by Matt Barrie (CEO, Freelancer.com) and Bill Bartee (Managing Partner, Southern Cross Ventures).

A feature of this course is that it is heavily industry-focused, and every week, we have successful real-world entrepreneurs (not just a lecturer) as guest speakers to share their experience and expertise.

Ask TVC is a site our group have launched to share this exclusive opportunity with the world. If you are running a business, or thinking about getting into the game, then fire your questions away. We’ll gather the top rated questions for each speaker and we’ll post the answers after the lecture.

The answers to Tjoos.com (Kim Chen and Bart Jallema) questions are now posted, and we still have Viocorp (Ian Gardiner), Omnisio (now YouTube; Ryan Junee), Atlassian (Mike Cannon-Brookes), and many more to come!

So check us out at asktvc.nfshost.com and let us know what you think.

The story behind my website’s new look

You might have noticed that my blog has a new theme! It’s wonderful that with WordPress, changing to a new theme only takes a few mouse clicks.

However, there was a bit of drama behind why I made the change – unfortunate, but a valuable experience indeed. My website was hacked.

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pv – a Python library to monitor/control PV Inverters

After having the solar electricity system installed, I can monitor the energy output of the inverter using Pro Control. However, because the software runs on Windows, I’d have to have a PC turned on just for that purpose wasting quite a bit of energy. So, my goal is to use a low-power embedded Debian box (which is usually on) to do the monitoring. Instead of just writing an application to do the job, I’ve decided to write a library others can use to write their own custom logging software.

pv can be found at http://pv.codeplex.com/, and should work for you if you have a Carbon Management Solutions CMS-2000 or Schneider Electric SunEzy 600E (judging from a sample protocol exchange).

I’ll have to give full credit to the folks at http://www.solarfreaks.com/cms2000-inverter-rs232-serial-port-hack-cms-2000-rs232-t271.html who did the initial work on reverse engineering the communication protocols. Building on what has already been done on working out the protocol, and doing a bit of reverse engineering myself, the library supports sending arbitrary data frames for further exploring, as well as the known protocols.

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Installing Solar Panels to Generate Grid-fed Electricity

Not long ago, we took advantage of the various NSW government rebates plus the massive 66c/kWh EnergyAustralia feed-in tariff, and had solar panels installed on the roof of our house by Andrew Hanna Electrical. The specs of our system are as follows:

• Carbon Management Solutions CMS-2000 grid interactive inverter
• 10x Solar Enertech SE185-72M 185W Monocrystalline Silicon PV Modules

During the installation, they’ve kindly put a Cat5 cable through the house for the RS-232 serial connection from the PV inverter to the computer. The CMS-2000 is basically a re-badged Solar Energy Australia “Orion” grid feed inverter, which comes with monitoring software “Pro Control” to log data from the inverter. Armed with this software, we can now pull some interesting data to see how much energy we generate at various times throughout the day.

The only problem is, it doesn’t make sense to have a computer switched on 24×7 just to monitor the inverter box – it’d be a massive waste of energy. So the fun begins when I want to monitor the solar inverter from a low-power, embedded computer which is actually a QNAP TS-109 NAS running my favourite Debian linux. More on this in upcoming posts.