peripheral interface of internal components - idea/question

[ploing]

From what I have seen of the internal workings of my Thinkpad I have reason to believe that components like the webcam, SD cardreader and the fingerprintreader use the USB interface to connect to the rest of the system. Can someone verify this?

If this is true, then shouldn't it be possible to - let's say - replace the fingerprintreader with the internals of a USB 2.4GHz cordless-mouse receiver? Actually I already removed my fingerprintreadermodul and measured the voltage levels on the four lane ribbon cable - but they didn't match with standard USB levels. Maybe I switched the reader to "hidden" in BIOS prior to the measurement and got faulty readings because of that.

Another replacement idea would be an internal 4GB or 8GB memorystick with a bootable windows/linux OS+driverpackage+harddrive recovery tool + system diagnostic tools.

Has anybody tinkered around with similar ideas? How far did you get?

I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels that the resources for certain features of his/her thinkpad could have been spent on something more useful

[aaa]

People have done this with other laptops before. Basically soldering some interesting usb device to the bluetooth connector (which is often usb) or to the docking connector.

Not sure what Thinkpad you have, but if you just want a 4GB recovery drive, it might be possible to simply put it on TurboMemory, These are standard PCIe cards that add flash-based cache, I'm not sure if you can boot off it but I think it's seen as a regular disk.

[ploing]

People have done this with other laptops before. Basically soldering some interesting usb device to the bluetooth connector (which is often usb) or to the docking connector.

Not sure what Thinkpad you have, but if you just want a 4GB recovery drive, it might be possible to simply put it on TurboMemory, These are standard PCIe cards that add flash-based cache, I'm not sure if you can boot off it but I think it's seen as a regular disk.

Question would be if they are identified as a regular disk by the BIOS or if that only works on OS level with a specific driver.

Booting from a USB stick is natively supported, but I'm more interested in an internal wireless HID receiver aynway. If I get around to it and it works out fine I'll post some pictures and instructions.