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.

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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R.I.P suitsbeta, the death of SUITS server

If you’ve recently accessed Sydney University IT Society’s website, you might have noticed that it loaded rather slowly. About an hour later, I received an HTTP 500 while trying to get to the website, and it won’t even come up.

Later today, our IT guy sent an email with the subject “The death of suitsbeta”:

At approximately 1445 today, suitsbeta shut itself down, never to wake up again. Attempts were made to revive it by powering it up, but alas it failed to POST. Our thoughts go out to its family and friends.

Tim

So it turns out that our trusty server that hosted our website has kicked the bucket after its dedicated service to the society. Even though it has graduated from ‘beta’ so that the internal DNS name of ‘suits’ pointed to it, it will always be remembered as ‘suitsbeta’.

It was Pentium 4 1.6 GHz, with only 768MB of memory and less hard disk space than your average laptop.

I was fortunate enough to be with it in its final moments, and watched while it booted into the linux 2.6 kernel. It took minutes upon minutes to check even a few megabytes of the kernel image to see if it is initramfs.

Anyway, we are currently in search of a new server, and let’s look forward to a newer and better machine. Maybe even virtualise the server so disaster recovery is a bit less painful.