Project: Notebook Dock Mod -56k warning.

Hello everyone and welcome to what seems to be only my second big mod, the first one being here and it's not even big) One of my first mods and obviously some infuence for this one can be seen here.

But what is important is this; how many notebook docks/port replicators have you seen modded? hmm? I thought so. Not many. Now then, let me get on with the story.

I have a very sweet Sony Vaio which I bought off these forums (thanks tweeker) and I love it to death. It's become my main machine. It does everything I need it to, and I've been running it at 600mhz for the last year or so and I have no problems getting done what needs to get done. And if I ever do, then I have 1.7ghz of Dothan power. (ok don't laugh if you have a Merom or Yonah) Now what's makes this even better is I have a nice dock that it came with. I never really use the dock, but I do play alot of emulated games using a PSX to USB adapter.

It's all good but I don't enjoy having a gray box attached to my computer and then having the PSX controllers plugged into that. So I thought to myself, "Why don't I do something about that?" ...and that's exactly what I did.

We have the dock>


and we have the USB adapter taken out of it's ugly grey box.


The first step is to break off the blue connectors which the Playstation controllers plug into.


So far so good, but I did manage to burn myself about 3 times through the course of the entire mod.

Next thing (after measuring everything twice) is to start soldering the new wires onto the PCB. I used an old serial cable, or was it a printer cable, doesn't matter. For the other side I did one better and decided to go with IDE cable. It's a lot thinner so it takes up much less space, however it's tiny so it's difficult to work with.




I then double checked the USB plug it used to have to see which wires go to which pin Only later did I realize I could just search Google for "usb pinouts"


Sizing it up and getting ready to solder.


A few pictures to show what the ports look like when in place.

I then put it all together and fired her up and.....OMG, it doesn't work. WTF is wrong why why why? I did everything right. Life isn't fair!

The trouble was, I never actually tried that adapter in this dock, and I ended up with the error "Power Surge on Hub Port" and the device simply refused to work. Well, a true modder never gives up so on I went. I needed more power. More power comes from more USB ports.

Started by cutting a USB cord (poor USB cord) and then wired that puppy up to the device like so. I used a USB because I didn't want to chance soldering it and having it not work again.



It did work! However, now, the program I used this device most for (ZSNES) decided to crash every time I started it up. If I plugged into just the USB port on the laptop it worked fine, however if I plugged into two USB ports on the dock, no, it had to crash and burn. Speaking of burning, I certainly was by now.

After a lot of fooling around I finally got to work without crashing. (it ended up breaking again but I got it working again)

Then I went for the final wiring configuration.



It worked!

Needless to say, after I screwed everything shut, it decided to give me problems again. However, I just kept plugging it in over and over and restarting until it worked, and it does now.

And now, the finished product. Please feel free to comment or ask any questions.

Thanks, Emmanuel

Incredibly awesomely sweet, great job, looks very clean.

Props!!

Sweet. It looks pretty good

......that is awsome........

looks good.. next time try a powered USB hub bridged into the USB connection instead.

wow very nice job! Looks almost factory installed

very nice!

nice job!
btw how did you connect the controllers to the computer before you did the mod?

threeme2189 said:

nice job!
btw how did you connect the controllers to the computer before you did the mod?

Click to expand...

controller adapters are USB devices; you plug controller into the box and the box has a usb cord you plug into the PC. He simply removed the extra connectors and connected it directly to the USB ports inside the dock. Or atleast thats what I assume.