1202 ALARM

When I had the tablet PC apart I noticed that the camera had just 4 wires coming out of it, so it was probably USB . A bit of investigation showed the three USB connections (camera, internal wi - fi and the USB socket) all going back to one chip on the board, clearly a USB hub of some sort. Anyway, the camera was a bit pants and I thought it would be much cooler to have internal Bluetooth , especially now I am playing about with the Google App Inventor's Bluetooth functions. I disassembled a USB Bluetooth adaptor and made a test connection to try it out in place of the camera. First time out it didn't work, but reversing the D+ and D- USB connections did the trick and it worked. For some odd reason the camera module had these connections reversed although every other USB module I've seen including the wi - fi one in the tablet seems to follow the standard USB wiring conventions. All I need to do now is tidy the wiring up by removing the USB plug from the Blueto...

DOS running 'live' on a netbook . I upgraded the RAM on this original Acer A110 from 512Mb to 1 Gb using a RAM module I got from another kind donor and am waiting on parts from China to do a cheapo upgrade of the 8 Gb solid-state HDD to an 80 Gb SATA one extracted from a laptop that had been run over by a car (I kid thee not, actually run over... by a car). Anyway in the meantime I've been trying different Linux distros , Android and even DOS on it and DOS is actually pretty cool, especially FreeDOS and FreeGEM .

I bought this Android tablet from a mate for £20. I think it was a warranty return or something he got on eBay. Anyway, it worked for about a week and then just quit and it looks like the power board or maybe the inverter for the screen has gone wonky because there is a buzzing sound when you try and power it up. That said, after just a week I was hooked! I was able to plug a 3G dongle in and surf the web from anywhere, just like rich people do with iPads (!) and Bluetooth worked out-of-the-box with a £1 dongle from... PoundWorld. What really got me excited was when I got my first app working on it. Okay so it was only the tutorial app from Google App Inventor and admittedly it was just a photo of a cat that purred when you touched it, but it worked. Now App Inventor includes libraries for Bluetooth and USB communications so if I could get this thing working again it would be the dashboard car console to kill for, for £20! UPDATE - THE TABLET IS WORKING AGAIN!!! I took it apart on 24...