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Adding a USB port to the ThinkPad X1 Nano (the hard way)

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Re: Adding a USB port to the ThinkPad X1 Nano (the hard way)

#41

Post by Aurornis »

utensil4778 wrote: post #4
freedomben wrote: post #2

Amazing adventure and great write up! It reads like an adventure novel :-) > Unfortunately, Lenovo continues to implement a stupid network card whitelist that IBM started over 20 years ago on its ThinkPad models. If the card in the M.2 slot is not advertising a known PCI vendor and product ID in the whitelist contained in the BIOS (now UEFI firmware), the ThinkPad will refuse to boot. Why?? Are there legitimate reaso…

The usual line that Lenovo gives is that this is for FCC reasons. The argument goes that the laptop is FCC certified as an entire unit, and changing the WiFi card technically invalidates this. This is quite plainly nonsense. Every other manufacturer allows WiFi adapter replacements because every module on the market must be individually FCC certified. Technically, the claim does make sense under a creative interpreta…

> This is quite plainly nonsense.

Unfortunately, Lenovo is actually correct in how the laws are written.

Whether or not they would get in trouble for it is a different question. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were put on notice for something 20 years ago by an over eager FCC person and they took the lesson to heart. Once a company gets threatened for something they rarely go back, even if other companies are getting away with it.

Re: Adding a USB port to the ThinkPad X1 Nano (the hard way)

#42

Post by toast0 »

breakingcups wrote: post #33
russdill wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the safe thing to do. If you source power from some other place you have to worry about not accidentally back powering something by mistake. Granted, this can be accomplished just by carefully ruling out the possibility. Some people would rather just not risk making a mistake here

I'm not an electronics engineer, but is it safe to shift 3.3v to 5v if the underlying hardware wasn't designed for that? Is there a chance to put too much strain on the power source?

You've got to stay under the engineered current limits on the provided 3.3v, including how much current is reasonable on all the wiring to your boost converter, but chances are good that mouse transceiver uses much less than the typical usb bus powered maximum current of 500 mA, and even at 75% efficiency, that's about 1 amp at 3.3v, which doesn't need thick wires or traces, or a big power supply.

The transceiver probably does use more power than a fingerprint reader, especially if the reader is idle, but likely not enough to worry about.

Re: Adding a USB port to the ThinkPad X1 Nano (the hard way)

#43

Post by utensil4778 »

Rinzler89 wrote: post #7
utensil4778 wrote: post #6

I had to do a similar thing with my T530. I wanted to upgrade to a WiFi 6+Bluetooth card. The built in Bluetooth adapter is very old, I think v4.2. It's also a finicky module with a mezzanine connector, and it's nestled deeply into the internal magnesium frame so the range is abysmal. I reflashed the BIOS to kill the whitelist, but I'm left with a bigger problem. The WiFi slot offers PCI, but not USB. The WWAN slot h…

>I reflashed the BIOS to kill the whitelist Still boggles my mind that people praise ThinkPads as an option for those looking for repairability and upgradability while casually talking about the built-in BIOS whitelist designed to block all that. To me that means an instant black ball. It's cool hackers are patching this out, but this anti-consumer feature should not be present in the first place in something people…

How do you feel about the Intel management engine, which is a permanent backdoor with total hardware access which is fundamentally impossible to remove? Or AMD's equivalent, or NVIDIA's proprietary driver blobs, or the closed and un-auditable firmware on every computer ever?

Nobody is selling computers that are fully open. Even Framework uses a closed firmware.

In our modern capitalist hellscape, you sometimes have to settle for the least worst option. The BIOS whitelist on older thinkpads is completely trivial to defeat, and apart from that they are incredibly durable and repairable machines. The T530 came out in 2013, and has been my daily driver for near 10 years, after buying it used for $100. I'd say that kind of longevity is more than worth the effort of flipping some bits in a BIOS image.

If you want to draw hard lines like this, then you've ruled out absolutely every machine produced in the last 30 years. Nothing is fully open. You simply have zero options.

Re: Adding a USB port to the ThinkPad X1 Nano (the hard way)

#44

Post by dTal »

Rinzler89 wrote: post #7
utensil4778 wrote: post #6

I had to do a similar thing with my T530. I wanted to upgrade to a WiFi 6+Bluetooth card. The built in Bluetooth adapter is very old, I think v4.2. It's also a finicky module with a mezzanine connector, and it's nestled deeply into the internal magnesium frame so the range is abysmal. I reflashed the BIOS to kill the whitelist, but I'm left with a bigger problem. The WiFi slot offers PCI, but not USB. The WWAN slot h…

>I reflashed the BIOS to kill the whitelist Still boggles my mind that people praise ThinkPads as an option for those looking for repairability and upgradability while casually talking about the built-in BIOS whitelist designed to block all that. To me that means an instant black ball. It's cool hackers are patching this out, but this anti-consumer feature should not be present in the first place in something people…

Everything's relative. Sure, the BIOS whitelist is a serious mark in the "bad" column. In the "good" column, my daily driver is a Frankenpad made from a T480 with the 7-row keyboard from a T25, the 500 nit screen and glass touchpad from an X1 Carbon gen 6, a 2TB SSD upgrade, a 32GB RAM upgrade (two slots! I could even have had 64) and a magnesium lid for kicks. There is no other laptop brand with this many options for slicing, dicing, and upgrading in this fashion.

Is this modularity mostly an incidental side effect of part reuse and corporate serviceability for Lenovo's benefit rather than ours? Sure. But hacking isn't always about what things were designed to do - it's about what they can do.

Re: Adding a USB port to the ThinkPad X1 Nano (the hard way)

#45

Post by derefr »

utensil4778 wrote: post #4
freedomben wrote: post #2

Amazing adventure and great write up! It reads like an adventure novel :-) > Unfortunately, Lenovo continues to implement a stupid network card whitelist that IBM started over 20 years ago on its ThinkPad models. If the card in the M.2 slot is not advertising a known PCI vendor and product ID in the whitelist contained in the BIOS (now UEFI firmware), the ThinkPad will refuse to boot. Why?? Are there legitimate reaso…

The usual line that Lenovo gives is that this is for FCC reasons. The argument goes that the laptop is FCC certified as an entire unit, and changing the WiFi card technically invalidates this. This is quite plainly nonsense. Every other manufacturer allows WiFi adapter replacements because every module on the market must be individually FCC certified. Technically, the claim does make sense under a creative interpreta…

> This is quite plainly nonsense. Every other manufacturer allows WiFi adapter replacements because every module on the market must be individually FCC certified.

Perhaps every other OEM are running antennas through the case that have exactly the gain you'd expect on the bands you'd expect; while Lenovo are using better-than-average antenna designs together with lower signal amplification to achieve the same SNR with lower total power consumption.

If that's the case, then swapping out the wi-fi card for one that hasn't been programmed for below-standard signal amplification, will get you a system that's above the FCC limits.

Re: Adding a USB port to the ThinkPad X1 Nano (the hard way)

#46

Post by derefr »

nemosaltat wrote: post #15
utensil4778 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The usual line that Lenovo gives is that this is for FCC reasons. The argument goes that the laptop is FCC certified as an entire unit, and changing the WiFi card technically invalidates this. This is quite plainly nonsense. Every other manufacturer allows WiFi adapter replacements because every module on the market must be individually FCC certified. Technically, the claim does make sense under a creative interpreta…

If that sounds silly, while working in commercial construction in Los Angeles, we encountered pushback for placing UL-listed devices in a UL-listed enclosure. The city determined that to be a “new assembly” and required UL listing for the entire unit. UL has a category for this situation; the enclosure is “UL recognized” because all of the devices and the enclosure are UL-listed. Their proposed solution, which UL was…

I assume you know this, but depending on what the enclosure was made of, what frequencies the devices inside were broadcasting at, and where you placed them inside, you could very well have accidentally produced a resonating chamber, parabolic antenna emitter, or other type of structural frequency-specific gain-boosting mechanism.

They likely wanted to just make sure that you hadn't done that. (And to do that, they had to send some fellows whose time was very expensive, because it takes long experience to build up an intuition for these things to the point that you're confident enough in your answer to not have to bother with the "measure everything and plug-and-chug the dynamics in a simulator" step.)

Re: Adding a USB port to the ThinkPad X1 Nano (the hard way)

#47

Post by wl »

utensil4778 wrote: post #4
freedomben wrote: post #2

Amazing adventure and great write up! It reads like an adventure novel :-) > Unfortunately, Lenovo continues to implement a stupid network card whitelist that IBM started over 20 years ago on its ThinkPad models. If the card in the M.2 slot is not advertising a known PCI vendor and product ID in the whitelist contained in the BIOS (now UEFI firmware), the ThinkPad will refuse to boot. Why?? Are there legitimate reaso…

The usual line that Lenovo gives is that this is for FCC reasons. The argument goes that the laptop is FCC certified as an entire unit, and changing the WiFi card technically invalidates this. This is quite plainly nonsense. Every other manufacturer allows WiFi adapter replacements because every module on the market must be individually FCC certified. Technically, the claim does make sense under a creative interpreta…

The slot in question is not a slot for a part 15 WiFi card. It's a slot for a cellular modem, complete with pins going to a SIM slot. There's FCC complications with that that go beyond the standard part 15 rules. You're also dealing with carrier certifications—yes, carriers want your precise M.2 cellular modem, laptop, and antenna configuration tested before they allow your device on the network. (In practice you can get away with not doing this, although some carriers are making moves to eventually disallow devices whose TACs can't be tied to a carrier certification.)

Re: Adding a USB port to the ThinkPad X1 Nano (the hard way)

#48

Post by ssl-3 »

breakingcups wrote: post #33
russdill wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the safe thing to do. If you source power from some other place you have to worry about not accidentally back powering something by mistake. Granted, this can be accomplished just by carefully ruling out the possibility. Some people would rather just not risk making a mistake here

I'm not an electronics engineer, but is it safe to shift 3.3v to 5v if the underlying hardware wasn't designed for that? Is there a chance to put too much strain on the power source?

The computer doesn't know that it has a 3.3v line externally boosted to 5v. It doesn't care about that at all.

It can care about how much power is being used, since the upstream 3.3v power supply -- whatever it may consist of -- is a finite thing.

But power is not the same as voltage. A device running from 5v does not necessarily use any more or less power than one that runs from 3.3v does. We don't have enough data to quantitatively know if power consumption is problematic or not for this particular instance, but I very strongly suspect that it is not an important concern here.

Finally, computers (and computer-like things) definitely do care about signal voltage. But USB signalling voltage is the same regardless of supply voltage, with USB 2 working between ~0v at the low end and at most 440mV at the high end, and tolerating up to 3.6v for compatibility with previous versions -- by specification. So that's not an issue.

Tl;dr, it's fine. And the author did a fantastic job of executing this hack very, very cleanly.

I think I myself would have taken the easy route and found a good place to run a bodge wire for 5v, and maybe even stripped the Logitech adapter out of its housing for some good old fashioned soldering fun, but everyone has their own proclivities.

Re: Adding a USB port to the ThinkPad X1 Nano (the hard way)

#49

Post by ssl-3 »

wl wrote: post #47
utensil4778 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The usual line that Lenovo gives is that this is for FCC reasons. The argument goes that the laptop is FCC certified as an entire unit, and changing the WiFi card technically invalidates this. This is quite plainly nonsense. Every other manufacturer allows WiFi adapter replacements because every module on the market must be individually FCC certified. Technically, the claim does make sense under a creative interpreta…

The slot in question is not a slot for a part 15 WiFi card. It's a slot for a cellular modem, complete with pins going to a SIM slot. There's FCC complications with that that go beyond the standard part 15 rules. You're also dealing with carrier certifications—yes, carriers want your precise M.2 cellular modem, laptop, and antenna configuration tested before they allow your device on the network. (In practice you can…

Eh? I didn't know that only one singular slot was in question here, or that the conversation had shifted from talking about WiFi to instead talking about cellular.

My own ThinkPad absolutely has independent slots for WiFi and cellular cards, and they look similar but they aren't even electrically compatible. (One is a mini PCIe with PCI Express and without USB, and the other is mini PCIe with USB and without PCI Express.)

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