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.

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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Mini-Project: Command line speech synth tool for Windows

The story behind this mini-project is, a friend of mine mentioned how he would SSH into his Mac at home and use “say” to send a short message to his parents, just like in a past XKCD webcomic:

Mac users, lucky you. You get a Terminal utility called “say” that converts text to speech. Windows doesn’t come with this tool, so I thought, it couldn’t be that difficult to make my own command line speech synth tool for Windows.

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Mini-Project: Moving a WordPress.com blog to own servers

It’s been about a month since I’ve migrated my blog from a hosted service at WordPress.com to hosting my WordPress blog on my own servers. So far, everything is doing quite alright especially the benefits of self hosting WordPress which gives me total control over my contents and my plugins.

So this is intended to be a guide plus some thoughts and recommendations for anyone who wants to move their blog from WordPress.com over to their own web host.

Moving from WordPress.com has advantages over moving from another service – pretty much all of your content can be migrated over without any loss of information. This includes posts, pages, categories, tags and even users if you have more than one. It’s also another reason why it is so easy to make the switch.

Why host your own WordPress?

For a while, my blog was hosted on WordPress.com. It was great – it was easy to set up, easy to use (especially with Live Writer), always available and best of all, it was all free.

But then, after a while there are some limitations that start to show up once you’ve used WordPress.com for a while. For a start, the URL that comes with your blog is in the form of http://<blog name>.wordpress.com/, and you can’t really change this your http://<blog name>.com or anything shorter. Well you could, but you’d have to pay USD$10 a year just so that you can use your own domain name and point it at your WordPress.com blog. Registering the actual domain name costs extra, of course.

Apart from the domain name, all of the WordPress.com feature upgrades turns out to be included when you host your own WordPress blog. This includes uploading videos, customising the CSS look and feel, none of their ads and the option to put your own ads in, unlimited users and as much disk space as your hosting provider gives you. If you’re already reaching or exceeding the free limits of WordPress.com, then why not change over?

There is actually a community of people whom self host the free and open source WordPress blog engine, which can be sourced from http://www.wordpress.org/.

Intended audience

This is a recount of the steps I took in migrating my blog. If you want to use this as a guide to do the same, then you would need prior knowledge or experience in setting up a basic web site.

The Procedure

The basic procedure involves exporting the contents of the blog posts from the old wordpress blog, and then importing it into the new self hosted WordPress installation. Although, there are some other things can be done to make it even more painless.

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Mini-Project: Home Theatre PC

Introduction

A while ago, I’ve designed a home theatre PC build for regular TV viewing and recording. Recently I’ve followed it up with an unceremonious unboxing of various parts involved in that HTPC. So the thing that comes after unboxing is putting it together. So in this article, I’ll share my thoughts and experiences while building this machine.

Several factors are of importance to this build: power efficiency, noise and heat while at the same time it must be capable of high definition recording and playback. These factors are typical for many other home theatre builds.

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