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Hardware
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Written by Favu
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Thursday, 07 December 2006 12:51 |
A while back I got one of those freebie pen drives, you know, the ones with “brand x” or “superbrand y” stamped on? Well, as is the norm for these things they are usually cheap and my pen drive was no exception, the build quality was lousy and the capacity was a whopping 16 megabytes of pure storage. Despite this it was soon pressed into service ferrying documents to/from my college.
After a few months of this the case actually fell apart, leaving me with a bare circuit board, and some unimpressed lecturers. The solution to my portable storage woes? A CUSBPDC! (that's Custom USB Pen Drive Case for those of you not in the know)
After looking at the PCB and not being able to figure out how to get enough power for the big blue LED I planned to use I sent off for some help from my good friend tevildo, together we schemed to remove the R12 resistor and bridge the gap with some solder, then I would solder two 330R resistors in parallel onto one leg of my LED to take some of the stress off it.
 (Click to enlarge)
Some Soldering.
Right, onto the fun stuff! Here I am two thirds of the way through the soldering. Yes I know that it's a horrible job but my soldering iron sucks, and I haven't done this in a while, so go easy on me, eh? As you can see the 330R resistors are in parallel with the LED. I wish I could tell you what the LED is rated as, but I have no idea, I came across a few of these in a bag while I was hunting for something in the attic!
After poking the wires from the LED into the right holes and plugging the whole thing into my PC to test that it all still worked I soldered them in place Much neater soldering, I apologise for the picture quality, it was getting dark at this point and I have no desk lamp. Housing it.
Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of this step, I must have been distracted or something. I took the little case that cocktail sticks come in and cut a hole in the bottom, I then fitted the USB stick inside with a few pieces of wood so that it wouldn't move around when it was plugged in or out of a system. I also sanded the clear lid to defuse some of the light from the LED, I did the same to the LED because I am all for equal rights. I also added a piece of cardboard to hide the PCB from anyone nosey enough to look into the drive and to reflect more on the light from the LED outwards. After testing to make sure everything still worked and isolating the wires I glued it shut with a few drops of UHU gel glue.
 After all that work, I now have a USB pen drive that sticks out like a sore thumb and that is actually less portable than previously because of its huge size. Was it worth it? Sure it was! The total cost to me was 5 pounds as I had to go out and buy some solder, but everything else I had lying around. All in all it took me around 5 hours. Here are a few more shots with and without flash to show just what I ended up with :)  |
