This was a slightly old project but an easy way to save 20 bucks in half an hour, this is a really quick modification to add a cheap chinese bluetooth module to the lenovo S10 or S11G3G netbook. Mine is an S11G3G which has a built in 3g modem and gps. Sadly it had no bluetooth - and since i find these impossible to use without an external mouse - it had to have internal bluetooth. A usb bluetooth adapter over to dealextreme.com I had picked up a few weeks earlier fit the bill nicely. And the price was right coming in under 2 dollars. If you are not comfortable voiding your warrenty - I would suggest surfing ebay to find a correct adapter that will fit inside for around 26 dollars or so.

Time for project: 30 minutes

Step 1.

Open up the handrest - this is just 4 screws on the bottom of the front of the laptop. Pry up and it will flip over.

Step 2. Find the bluetooth connector next to the right speaker.

Step 3.Unsolder the existing bluetooth connector - you can just melt through the plastic with a soldering iron. Then mop up with some desoldering braid.

Now the connector is wired as follows: I found the usb pins just through trial and error - but found this listing later. We dont really care too much about the extra pins - so we are not going to use them.

Pin# Signal name Description
1 +3.3V Positive supply for whole module.
2 GND Ground Pin.
3 USB_D- USB data minus.
4 USB_D+ USB data plus.
5 LED BT activity LED indicator. Active high to indicate the BT activity.
6 Reserved/ BT_Active
7 Reserved/ WLAN_Active
8 BT_ON# Active Low to enable BT radio function. High to disable Radio function

Now take apart the small usb bluetooth adapter - the one I had was like this: http://www.dealextreme.com/p/super-mini-bluetooth-2-0-adapter-dongle-vista-compatible-11866

You can just pry off the top plastic to reveal the module inside which will then slide out of the metal shell.

This module has a 3.3V regulator on it to drop 5V from the USB down to 3.3 - I took this out - since the internal power connector only supplied 3.3V so it was not needed (and might cause bad things if it was left in due to the voltage drop across it)Some of the other modules I had did not have this regulator - so YMMV

I bridged a wire across the input and output pin of the regulator - and soldered 4 jumpers to the power and data pins on the module.

Finally it is time to put this into the laptop. put some heat shrink around the module to prevent it from shorting out on any other pieces in the case (that gold/orange paint is conductive for EMI protection) And solder it to the connector - I found some alternative points for the power and ground that seemed a little more stable than the small connector pads.

Finally get some hot glue and put it over the top of the connector so nothing shorts out - and also use it to secure the bluetooth module so it does not move around and become annoying.

Check for shorts! And enjoy your new internal bluetooth module. These modules work nicely with the microsoft bluetooth stack. however the microsoft stack is pretty limited. So I went and installed the toshiba stack - which allowed me to use this with my bluetooth headphones and several other devices as well as the standard keyboard and mouse.