Do I have a way to make my laptop work with FireWire or Thunderbolt connections?
Do I have a way to make my laptop work with FireWire or Thunderbolt connections?
I recently bought a FireWire audio interface and mixer but want to connect it to my desktop and also take it on the road. I need to plug this into my Acer laptop (model AN515-54) because the original setup won't work for travel. After reading about it, I found that M.2 PCIe risers can let me add a FireWire card to my laptop, or at least try that route. If that doesn't work out, I'm also thinking of using Thunderbolt 3 converters (maybe from Apple) to turn TB3 into TB2, and then use those as an extra step to get back to FireWire. Would anyone have any tips or suggestions? Please help!
Hey new guy, do you want to know which card make or model you were talking about before?
I'm not 100% sure what you need, but here is the full list! The interface and mixer are a Presonus StudioLive 24.4.2. The Riser is an ADT-Link R42SF. My laptop is an Acer Nitro 5 AN515-54.
I was kinda wondering if it could work - even though a little bit risky, that's why I'm posting here with folks who know better than me. If I could get the riser card and screw a low-profile FireWire PCIe card into the slot meant for the 2.5" drive, then maybe I can access it from the back by taking out the USB and Audio jack. Here is a video showing what's inside my laptop model. [YouTube Link] If I can plug the riser into that spare NVMe slot, run the PCIe end to the 2.5" bay, put the card in there, then use a tiny male-to-female FireWire cable and stick it out where the USB port used to be... like I said, maybe I'm crazy about this idea, but I just thought of something, not started building anything yet!
Not sure if you are still working on this, but I think there might be one way to do it. Your laptop has 1 mPCIe slot for the wifi card. You could take out the wifi card and install something else instead: a 3 Port 2b 1a 1394 Mini PCI Express FireWire Card Adapter - TAA Add 2 FireWire-800 and 1 FireWire-400 port through a Mini PCI Express slot from www.startech.com. This will get you firewire, and it has the latest & greatest TI XIO2213B firewire chip. I have one of these and it works great. If you still need wifi, you could buy a USB wifi adapter instead. The main problem would be having to deal with the big cable coming out of the mPCIe card. You can remove the 12V harness shown in the picture but the connector still sticks out a bit. You might have to cut into the bottom cover of the laptop or use the laptop without the bottom cover, though it looks like taking off that cover isn't super easy. Hope this helps
Thanks for the help! What I did was grab an old mini PC I already had (a Dell Inspiron 3650) and plug in a second FireWire card into it. Then I used Remote Desktop over ethernet to control that PC from my laptop, which gave me a super portable setup without needing any changes to my current laptop!