LeapingLamb

21 hours ago, Avatarass said:

Hello everyone, looks like I'm at least 5 years too late for party.

 

 

Does anyone know where I can either find one to buy, or at least find the original schematics so I can print my own?

 

 

Thank you.

@astrosynthesist tried to get new ones made. I have tried as well but the main connector for them is hard to come by at small quantities. I don’t know if there was any progress made. If you go back a few pages you can find all the schematics and diagrams. 
 

I ended up getting all the spare parts for a y510p and essentially built one from scratch, it was fun to source motherboards and cpus from AliExpress haha. I kind of lost interest in making the adapter as I switch to some other hobbies and general life. 
 

@rusTORK if you want to send me your adapter I wouldn’t be upset hehe ;) I actually still use the y510p quite frequently, it’s a nice machine and I ended up only paying about $300 for all the parts to rebuild it

@Avatarass and @astrosynthesist I am still watching this thread to see what progress everyone makes with this adapter!

1 hour ago, Karasiel said:

Finally!

Guys from farnell.com sent me mine backordered connectors to chosen UK mail-forward address. Despite "same day dispatch", shipment was made in 2 weeks, as I've placed my order on September 29^th and delivery was fulfilled on October 12^th.
And I've already forwarded them to my place. (Still in transition.)

Expenses are 66.99 USD for connectors themselves plus delivery to UK address (free delivery over UK, VAT included, however) and 7.50 USD for mail-forward services.

74.49 USD for 7 connectors

or

10.65 USD per unit.

@Karasiel I was curious if you have plans for all 7 connectors or if you would be willing to sell me 2 or 3? I haven’t pulled the trigger at farnell due to the minimum order quantity. I don’t really need 7 connectors but would be open to help you recoup some of your expenses if you don’t plan on using all of the 7 connectors.

@Karasiel would you be willing to sell me 3 connectors? Just like you I would like to build one of the adapters and change the design slightly. 

It doesn’t seem like I am able to send a DM to you @wendrickje

@Swung Huang do you have any adapters or just the ultrabay connectors left, I am Looking for one and wanted to see if you had some left overs that you want to get rid of (ideally just the ultrabay connector for a diy board)

 @High_Voltage those are all really good points. I hadn't thought about hooking something up directly. It might be a little tricky to do but maybe a better solution than my 3d printer idea; although I have seen people pause a print, insert something and then let it continue printing. This would encapsulate whatever you are using. In my case I could print the connector half way, lay proper metal traces on the print and then print over top to hold them in place. If I were to solder directly to the pads, I would just have to make sure I keep the wires as closely matched in lenght as possible. I think the first step for me is to procure a motherboard and actually see it to figure out the best option. 

thanks for the tip on the wlan card. Sounds like an AC 7260 is about the best I can get and put into the laptop. I am quite intriqued about getting an extra USB port. I would likley want to hook up a webcam so I would not want to steal any ports there; however, since I am not going to use the keyboard or the trackpad, I could see that being a viable option. I haven't had much time researching this and all I have found thus far is adapting a trackpad to USB but not the other way around. Would I be correct in the assumption that I would only have to hook up the 4 usb wires to the correct pins that the trackpad used?

2 hours ago, High_Voltage said:

@astrosynthesist I guess fan control in this laptop is something we've all dreamt of at some point. The default curve is just so incredibly bad causing throttling and system overheat even under moderate loads. You're right, in order to get control over the fan, we would need to create a custom EC firmware, which I guess isn't worth anyone's time. Or maybe, reverse-engineer existing one and append it with extra code to receive our commands via SMBUS, which is more doable but would still be very difficult due to how poorly-documented these EC chips are (I guess, all the datasheets are provided to companies under various NDAs).

 

When I was still using my Y510p, I constantly had this idea of a neat hardware mod in mind: CPU fan uses 4 pins: power, ground, PWM for speed control, and strobe to measure RPM. You could, for example, cut the fan cable and insert an ATtiny85V or other small chip in there, powering it off fan's power and ground wires, and cutting into the PWM wire so that motherboard's PWM goes into the MCU and the MCU then controls the fan with its own PWM. Then you could load a primitive program with a look-up table (LUT) for output PWM value vs input PWM value, essentially getting yourself a custom fan curve. A fun and interesting idea which I never had enough time to explore...

 

As for software side of the fan control and the dust removal routine, I remember seeing a very in-depth investigation into this on some forum a long while ago. They wanted to check whether there's a way to control the fan speed or is it just an "on-off" thing to rev it up to the maximum. It turned out to be the latter.

 

@LeapingLamb The easiest way to get the connector is to desolder it off your original Ultrabay GPU (it's not like it's useful for anything nowadays, anyway). For removing it you can try hot air or/and diluting solder in the joints with low melting point alloys like Rose's metal. Maybe, some workshop can do that for you (just make sure to let them know the part you want to keep is the connector, not the board). Also, mind sharing details on the project you're working on?

@High_Voltage I want to build a tablet. After looking around a lot of different laptop types, the Y510p struck my fancy. My project started with an old laptop that was broken. I salvaged a bunch of parts and was left with the LCD. I figured, hey, why not turn this into a tablet. At that point I started working backwards from the screen. The options I considered were:

1. get an old Nintendo Wii and salvage the motherboard and trim it down to make a portable wii. 

2. after the Wii idea, I thought because I had a 15" screen, there would be room for microcontroller to run android or linux (raspberry pi, odroid n2, lattepanda)

3. After looking at the specs of these single board computers, I came to the conclusion that what I wanted use the tablet for would require a bit more oomph. At that point I thought, why not find an old motherboard. I had an old one from an acer laptop but it ended up getting recycled a while ago. I started my journey on ebay

my journey was goverend by 

A. it needed to be budget friendly

B. it needed to be able to do some graphic stuff

because I am big fan of lenovo, I ended up looking around and decided that a motherboard with a GT 750m would suffice my needs as thats what is in my T440P that has been doing great. I ended up coming across the y510p and liked it. 

After a bit of research and coming across this thread I decided that a y510p tablet with the possibility of an eGPU was the way to go. I am able to locate all parts from china. The nice thing about using the Y510P was the fact that it has a seperate power button which is not integrated into the keyboard like some other budget laptops out there. After seeing this post and the work by @astrosynthesist i got really excited. I am imagining a y510p tablet with a docking station that has the eGPU. Now the critical part to my contraption is that connector. Given that I do not have a ultrabay graphics card, I am actually going to have to find a single connector somewhere. I am also considering the possibility of using a 3d printer to make a makeshift one (although that would require some reference measurements/pictures). 

Overall for creating the tablet, I would utilize a cnc/3d printer for a case and use a capacitive touch panel with usb converter to connect to the y510P. Given that the y510p has only a few usb ports, I have considered whether it is possible to use a bios with it that takes care of the whitelist for wlan cards. There is a wlan 9260 card with bluetooth 5.0 that uses the M.2 slot. using that card would open up the original wlan card slot for a mPCIe usb adapter to get an extra port. 

maybe this is all a pipedream but still a fun project to think about. If you have any input as in "yeah right, that'll never work" I'd be very interested to hear them.

@astrosynthesist i just wanted to say THANK YOU! Same goes to you @High_Voltage. I came across your thread after doing some research into a new laptop. I am a big fan of Lenovo and had my eye on the y510p for a project as I think it still holds a fair value. 

@astrosynthesist would you be able to let me know where you sourced the ultrabay connector from? I looked in a few places but I have a feeling you were lucky and called up the right salesperson at the right wholesale place as most places I've seen they sell them at a minimum quanity of a few hundred. I was thinking that maybe one could 3d print a replacement connector. Would you mind posting some good close up pictures? Might there be a different connector that isn't EOL that we could substitute for the ultrabay connector?