also the collab is amazing, been listening to it all day lol

Happy birthday!!! You have no idea how much your music has done for me, thank you so much

KiCad renders of a small board, top and bottom. The board has a USB-C connector, as well as three JST-SH (QWIIC) footprints, and a bunch of chips on it; the bottom layer is full of silkscreen, with the board name (eeeUSB2 adapter), pinouts, and explanations.

eUSB2 is the first embedded USB2 version I see, that looks promising and actually exists in the wild - on M3 Macs, Galaxy S24, Surface Laptop 7th ed., and so on.

So, I made a small breakout for a USB2-eUSB2 redriver, PTN3222! Tiny, packed with features, and open-source 🥰 github.com/CRImier/MyKi...

ThinkMoth update, its working and full speed PCIe 2.0 is training fine!

it stopped working later but details

a picture of an LGA 2011-1 socket with the retention mechanism at an unusual rotated angle. it should never look like that. (the retention bracket is unscrewed and i rotated it manually lol, the socket is fine)

did i do it right

introducing the ThinkMoth ExpressCard to NVME! an open source adapter that lets you use an M.2 2230/2242 NVMe SSD in an ExpressCard laptop, with support for booting via microSD!

prototype production is happening right now!

#opensource #kicad

mothenjoyer69.net/blog/0
github.com/mothenjoyer6...

same slot as before but with the soldering mostly cleaned up. Still a few shorts between some pins but that shouldn't be too hard to fix

not baaddd, getting there

sodimm slot in the process of being soldered on, with lots of bridged pins and uneven joints

could be going better, but luckily this is mostly a practice run on the least interesting board

motherboard ram slot solder pads after getting all the old solder wicked off

all cleaned up

side view of various pieces of the desoldered ram slot, showing a cross-section of the inside

modular curved gaming ram slot 😭

Don't worry, I didn't destroy a perfectly good ram slot. I'm trying to revive a board that had both slots damaged already by soldering on an intact replacement.

Laptop motherboard with one of the memory slots desoldered

gone

sodimm insterted into the unmounted slot at an angle, no longer held down by the retention clips

it's escaping

A DDR4 SODIMM memory module inserted into a DDR4 SODIMM memory slot that isn't soldered to a motherboard but just laying on my desk instead

Same as previous image but showing the other side

portable sodimm

I've left some short instructions in the github readme, but if someone wants to actually try it themselves and needs more help you're welcome to ask for help in the issues section on that repository.

Physically you flash to the BIOS chip, but it's not actually the BIOS region on the chip that is modified for this. Instead as far as I know the Intel Flash Image Tool modifies the ME region which is also responsible for configuring the PCH's Flex I/O.

Oh I shouldn't forget, thanks to @aisler.net for sponsoring the board for this project, using their recently added 0.8mm 4 layer PCB service which is perfect for custom M.2 cards like this!

I've been testing it on a ThinkCentre M720q but haven't gotten it to work fully over there yet. More research to be done.

In theory this can be applied to any multi-lane PCIe port running off of the PCH in an Intel system, as long as you have the appropriate version of the Intel Flash Image Tool and a bifurcation PCB that physically fits where you need it.

A picture of a Dell Latitude 5491 laptop with the bottom cover removed, showing a custom PCB installed in the SSD slot which is in turn host to 2 SSDs, filling up the otherwise unused empty space in the laptop.

Disk management program on Ubuntu 16.04 showing both SSDs being detected successfully

Just tested and confirmed functionality of my PCIe bifurcation adapter for my Dell Latitude laptop! With this I can install 2 NVMe SSDs in the single NVMe slot the laptop provides. More info and 'instructions' here: github.com/a-little-wif...

thirded

I see, that's a pretty smart place to look for this kind of info yeah, hadn't thought of that yet. Interesting remark from Intel, I assumed the expectation is that all traces are length matched at the connector of the memory module. Thanks!

Ayo what this thing has a socketed bios chip?? Need more of that fr

A red 5V wire soldered to the pins of a connector on the motherboard, plastic housing completely molten

12V and ground wires soldered to another connector on the motherboard, less molten plastic this time

Didn't have the correct power cable 😭 (don't worry, my soldering has improved a lot since I did this)

Interesting, that would be great, thanks. I don't have access to the official spec lol, so I'm just going off of what I can find.

PCB i'm working on recently, first time i have to draw such thick traces! This will be a weather balloon kinda thingy with a transmitter, GPS and some sensors.
Powered by CH32V103 btw!!

Oh, what do you mean? The DQS pairs aren't matched to the correct set of data bus pins? How are you supposed to deal with that.... I used a random desktop motherboard for reference to get my pinout in case that helps lol.

Thanks! It already helped me learn a lot about how this kind of memory works, and I hope it opens the door for doing some more interesting non-standard stuff. I sure hope it won't be useless haha.

Yay, thanks!

A 2.5" hard drive duct-taped to the inside of the case of a Cisco-rebranded Wyse thin client

Found this old thin client in storage with an amazing mounting system for the hard drive