The nano receivers that come with cordless mice are awesome, because you can leave them in the laptop all the time. Worked great on my Macbook, but it sticks out a little too much on the Lenovo Thinkpad W500. Therefore it gets caught when sliding the laptop into a bag, and eventually damaged my first receiver. I’ve always wanted to integrate the mouse receiver into a laptop, but could never justifying all the work for a proprietary controller. Finally Logitech has released a receiver that works with several of their devices, which they dub “Unifying Receiver”. It was time, but I didn’t realize that to get to the USB port contacts I would have to completely take apart the laptop. I’m very happy with the result and performance.
Had to unscrew the magnesium frame from the bottom of the laptop so that I could lift the motherboard to access the contacts for the USB port. Soldered the wires directly to the USB port contacts. This renders the USB port useless for other devices. The better way would be to solder a small USB hub inside the laptop, but I didn’t have one, nor did I want to deal with that.
Wires are taped down with a Kapton-like tape
Make sure to label the ends of the wires so you can identify them when soldering onto the reviever. Wires were passed through a space near the heatpipes. Hopefully they don’t get too hot to melt the insulation. I put a little extra tape there as insulation.
Wires trimmed and soldered to the receiver. Just long enough to allow the receiver to be positioned in a space under the plastic front near the keyboard.
Perfect space, and get’s great reception, because there’s no metal above.
What a great idea. So does it mean you’ll have to sacrifice one USB port to do this? And did you end up doing this with your Macbook also? Pls give a tutorial on it as well b/c I’d like to do this with my Macbook Pro.