WiFi Made Into Old Laptop Hard Drive!

OK, so its not go the best pictures, and it combines a few other things I learned... but here I go.

This is made from an old IBM laptop [2.5"] hard drive, a Zonet ZEW2500P USB Wireless Adapter, Home Made Antenna thing, USB, Hotglue, and luck.

BE CAREFUL! Some of these old drives, especially the Hitachi - IBM ones use glass platters... these are fragile, sharp and easy to break. The little silver slivers of glass will make your day very bad.

This was easy for me, I bought 2 really old Toshiba laptops at a garage sale, one works, one was dead with it's 720MB hard drive. That's what I used.

The drive is held together with tiny T6 torx screws. I picked up a multi-driver thing at Radio Shack to get them out with, it's handy for cell phones too!

I had to grind some of the inside out, also the motor needs to be removed. I used a socket that the spindle fit inside of and a big hammer with a punch on the back to literally break it off the case.  This worked very well, and gave me a lot of space inside to fir the card.

OK, now for the card. Take it out of it's plastic case, desolder the USB connector and add a cord. I wish I had a picture of this for you... I did the same with the antenna, any external will work, or build one like I did! there is lots of Instructables on this!


Once you got on a longer cord, and your antenna, you need to test fit.  I had to do a lot of grinding in the hard drive case, as well as cut out a notch for the wires to pass through. I wanted it to look as much as a hard drive as possible. Well, except the GIANT flashing antenna on top.

Be sure to insulate under the card some too. I used more hot glue, plus it holds it in.

Mod it, this is just for ideas! get you all started.  I also have a bluetooth I plan on doing a similar mod with. There's endless possibilities there, so have some fun!

By the way, This works great with my Cube PC!