GuruBlog

During my homeoffice phase one of my USB-Sticks brock - not a big thing I usually would simply go to a store an buy a new one - especially since this was a very cheap noname USB-Stick. But on the other hand it really anoyed me - there was only a little bit of plastick inside the housing that broke that rendered the stick basically useless because whenever you tried to plug it in it completely dissapeared inside.

Since I had some files on the stick I really needed, I removed the housing and used it for a few days without it - which worked perfectly fine - but felt really brittle and I didn't like pulling directly on the circuit board.

After a few days feeling a little bit angry about how cheapt the plastick enclosure was made and that it was obviously designed as a throw-away product, I decided to repair instead of replacing it and turn it into something like this

I started doodeling some initial desing ideas on paper and took measurements.

Since I'm a bit of a SciFi Geek and not beeing able to leave the house felt a bit like living on a spaceship I desided to use some scifi-rectangles instead of regular ones :-)

The enclosure I came up with consists of two parts, that should snap together and I created the designs using openscad. The basic shape is a polygon (rectangle with flatend corners as it should be) and extruded it - then I used boolean operators to create the space for the usb stick.

difference() {
    union() {
        translate([0,0,-2.5]) {
            linear_extrude(height=5)
            polygon(points=[
                [7,-20],[9,-18],
                [9,18],[7,20],[-7,20],[-9,18],
                [-9,-18],[-7,-20]
            ]);
        }
        translate([0,0,3]){
           cube([16,35,2],center=true);
       }
    }
    linear_extrude(height=5)
    polygon(points=[
        [6,-21],[6,-17],[7,-17],
        [7,17],[-7,17],
        [-7,-17],[-6,-17],[-6,-21]
    ]);
}

I printed it on my 3D Printer and - well - the usb stick was fitting but the upper part was a little bit to small to snap on to the lower part :-/ And I had issues with underextrusion - not sure yet why :-/

Before I fix the designs and reprint the whole thing I desided to use it for a few days to see if it fits my usb ports or if there are any other issues - so I closed it a bit crude using an exacto knive and lots of hot-glue.

Not exactly what I would call perfect - buy hey! - definitly better than before.