My netbook, DerpyHooves, is now back to being in one piece!  Yay!  This is the project that precipitated reverse engineering the logitech receiver, so I thought I would share it.

Theres the bugger. The logitech receiver is there, under the black heat shrink.

About a month ago, I decided it would be a good idea to take apart my EEE 701 completely, and add a tiny USB programmer to it.  I cadded up a circuit board for it (using EAGLE), had it printed, and bought some SMD parts from digikey and soldered it all together.  After some debugging, I was able to get it to work.  The total size of the unit is about .5″x.5″, about the size of my thumbnail.  The goal was to put it IN my computer, so I could do awesome embedded programming all over!  Flash all the memory!

Unfortunately, even though my boards worked, there was no really good way to get the wires from inside the computer to outside the computer.  It’s not as if my computer has a ZIF socket in it, or anything.  After a while I decided that it was a silly idea, but that I should really add some cool USB peripherals to my computer.  After looking around, I decided that I probably didn’t want a humping dog usb dongle, but that some extra storage and a USB keyboard and mouse would be nice.

After looking at a few guides on finding extra USB connections on the mobo, I soldered a few wires together and BAM, I had a USB port!  Then I cracked open a cheap USB hub and soldered it in.  After testing to see that the hub was connected, it was a simple matter of very carefully cutting open a logitech unifying receiver, and a cheepo SDHC card reader and soldering them onto the usb hub.  All of these were supposed to be internal and permanent, so destroying the cases was a must to conserve space.

Once all of that was done, I realized that sometimes I wanted these devices to be off, or that I might want to disconnect and reconnect them.  Very grudgingly, I used a DIP switch for this.  My main qualms with DIP switches is that they are so damn hard to flip; however, there weren’t many other options.  I wired it so that one side of the switch was all power, and the other side went to the power connections of the usb devices.

large yellow taped blob is the USB hub. Black labeled thing is the receiver. Card reader not pictured.