3G dongle built into screen surround

[cedley1969]

Going to have a go at fitting a pay as you go vodaphone 3g dongle into the space on the left of the screen a la the wifi dongle mod.
(early lilinux didn't have built in wifi and someone managed to fit the circuit board from a usb wifi dongle into the space inside the screen and patch the wiring into the back of one of the usb ports).
Lilinux just typed it above without thinking, I know its a bit americanised but its less of a gobfull than 'little linux laptop'.
Already got dongle working on maplin minibook running 1.1 so should just be a case of cramming it in there, I like the fact that the download speed of the dongle is about as much as the laptop could cope with anyway!

[Metradio]

Am surprised no one has had a go at fitting an extra USB socket on the front edge of a minibook lid, would get a mobile broadband dongle up nice and high when the minibook is in use..

Mike

[rodonn]

Any news of this hack?

[doblopirate]

Hi. I considered having a go at this mod.
Can anyone answer this question.
Can USB devices be daisy-chained?
In other words, could the WiFi device be left as it is, and the 3G dongle wired in parallel with it? In theory this should work, as I believe each USB device has its own id, but then why would you need a hub when the equivalent of 'y' connectors could do the job? I suppose the other option would be a physical switch to switch between the two as you would be unlikely to require both operating at once, but this would require the cramming in of even more hardware into a tiny space.

[Unhban]

Hi doblopirate. After reading the wiki I think the answer is more complex than either answers you give to the problem....

Here ya go! :

When a USB device is first connected to a USB host, the USB device enumeration process is started. The enumeration starts by sending a reset signal to the USB device. The speed of the USB device is determined during the reset signaling. After reset, the USB device's information is read by the host, then the device is assigned a unique 7-bit address. If the device is supported by the host, the device drivers needed for communicating with the device are loaded and the device is set to a configured state. If the USB host is restarted, the enumeration process is repeated for all connected devices.

So... plugging a dongle into a USB socket starts this process.... using a switch would not, and could well freeze or crash the machine....

Also, there's the practical side of using a dongle. Unless you have a cell on your doorstep, I've found that sometimes the dongle placement can be fairly critical, something you may not be able to do with it in the machine?

Enjoy!

Unh.
PS. maximum allowed length of a USB cable to a USB device is 5m. If longer the data transfer time is too long and the machine thinks the USB device is faulty...