Running PCMCIA from an external powersource

jimi_t

I'm not sure how feasible this is but...

For legacy laptops, using an 802.11 PCMCIA card is severly detrimental to battery life. Now I am presuming that this is because of the powerdraw from the card itself(?)

From what I gather, PCMCIA runs at 5v, Carbus at 3.3v.

Looking at the pinout, 17 and 51 supply power (?) with 34 acting as ground. 18 and 52 act as "Programming Voltage" 1 and 2 respectively.

http://www.interfacebus.com/Design_Connector_PCMCIA.html

Now I'm not au fait with this level of Hardware manipulation, but is there any glaringly obvious flaws with my presumption that I could remap (or remove outright) the connection from the relevant pins on the mobo and wire it out to an external power source?

The concept I was playing around with involves carving out a section of the chassis under the trackpad or thereabouts, creating a dock for a small-format li-on battery (I'm thinking repurposing a suitable phone battery?) to act as the sole powersource for anything in the PCMCIA port - with the end result being a "hot-swappable" interface to boost laptop battery life when surfing on older machines.

Asides from issues such as messing around with surface mount components, heat issues etc... are there any software driver issues (i.e. will the Windows BSOD on realising that a PCMCIA card is operating without drawing power through the Mobo - or indeed do the programming voltage pins act as a handshake system and, if so, if I leave them intact will the computer be blind to the fact that power isn't being drawn?).

The natural progression of this would be to see if I could tap onboard 802.11 implementations out to the edge of the chassis and wire it out to an off the shelf Li-on solution - maybe even going as far as to jury rig power for the SSD drive in something like Asus' Eee PC or take the strain off the battery for hacks people are doing like internal bluetooth (which piggybacks off the internal mini-PCI card).

So... any thoughts?

Anti

best of luck with this. Let us know how you get on.

jimi_t

Anti wrote: »

best of luck with this. Let us know how you get on.

Strictly theory at the moment - I need the helpful boardsies to point out the glaringly obvious problems I've missed before I go chopping up a lappy

Anti

I dont think many people here could help you too much with this. Unless there are a few others 2600 heads around these days.