Dell Precision M6500 - Any Internal USB Headers for Internal Mouse Receiver?

With my older XPS M1710, I wired in a USB header and installed a Logitech Nano Receiver for my mouse INSIDE of the laptop. This MOD rendered one of the external USB ports unusable, but that laptop had 6 USB ports and I don't like receivers hanging out of the system. The USB port and cable was ripped out of the extension cable that the mouse came with. Worked well!

You can see the older MOD below.





I am wondering if there are any internal USB headers in the M6500 so I can do the same thing. I took a look around inside of the system and I can probably wire it up the same way, but this system has less USB ports and the USB port is on a more expensive board (should I need to undo it).

My system doesn't have the fingerprint reader or contactless Smartcard reader. Are either of those internal USB devices? I guess the tricky part would be getting the right cable harness to solder a USB port onto. I have plenty of room to mount the receiver internally, and cable routing looks easy enough.

Any suggestions would be great!

BTW. I prefer this versus a Bluetooth mouse any day for numerous reasons.

 

Will you have an unused mini-PCIe slot? According to this info, the mini-PCIe pinout includes USB 2.0. Perhaps those slots are the composite devices listed under the USB controllers on my E6410.

John

 

Wow, good find! I have the WWAN slot free, and the FCM free. The half mini cards are used by the Bluetooth and WLAN cards. That just brought me to something...

A Mini-Card USB Controller? I found this one, but it's Mini PCI, not PCI Express.

 

I think I found it.

What do you think? I guess it's worth a shot?

Onbene.com. Mini PCI-Express USB & SATA Coverter Adapter Card

 

That looks good. It appears that the card comes as a full length unit with the option of being able to cut some off to fit a half height slot (or is that still longer than the half height slot?).

The remaining question is whether there is enough clearance in the slot to hold both this card and the dongle. If not, is it possible to cut away some of the card. (The photo here suggests that there isn't much scope for cutting a chunk out of the card without breaking the data lines). I am also tempted by this solution but it would be nice to actually fix a USB socket onto the mini PCIe card so that the USB dongle is easy to swap.

John

 

I'm ordering one. I just opened the access cover and was able to lay down the nano receiver. Not sure how much room there will be with the port, but I'm find routing the cable somewhere else if I need to. I'll be using the Logitech Unifying receiver, and I think all new products use that. It does exactly what I wanted the original nano receiver to do: accept pairings with ANY compatible mouse/keyboard, and multiple devices. The original didn't.

You can probably hack away at a female USB port so that it is the bare minimum to slide inside of the dongle. Hot glue goes a long way too.

Are the WWAN and FCM slots both standard mPCIe slots?

 

The Dell M6500 specs state "two full-height mini card slots two half-height mini-card slots" without any qualification. However, if there is anything non-standard then I suspect that it is more likely to be the FCM slot since the WWAN should be compatible with anything that the card manufacturers produce. However, whether Dell does not bother to enable the USB lines remains to be seen (the discussion here suggests that the SATA lines may not be enabled in all slots). My E6410 has about 8mm clearance in the WWAN slot which should be enough space for the dongle.

John

 

I got it. It works. I made a new post since I couldn't rename this one.

Thanks for the input.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/dell-latitude-vostro-precision/551598-precision-m6500-installed-logitech-unifying-receiver-mpcie-slot.html