Shoplifting in a Ghost Town

According to Tim over at Brickshelf, turing a bland cheap flash drive into something cute and ascetically pleasing is a fairly simple project!

It uses a 128MB Dick Smith electronics USB flash drive. The casing of
the DSE drive was easy to remove and from there it was a matter of
resizing the circuit board (it was slightly too large to fit inside a
2x4 Lego brick) by sanding down the edges.

I cut out the inside of a yellow 2x4 block (had to be yellow or red!..
the traditional lego colours but decided yellow looked cooler..) using
a scalpel with a small blade, and resized it by cutting off part of the
bottom so that it was the size of two flat 2x4 plates stacked on top of
eachother. 

The circuit board had to be sanded around the edges (unfortunately
i have no pics of the insides of the Lego drive) and the inner side
walls of the block had to be thinned, using sandpaper and lots of
tedious shaving with the back of the scalpel's blade before the circuitry
would fit inside. 

This done, i cut a slot in the front of the brick for the metal plug
to fit through and added some packing (folded up sellotape)inside to hold
the circuit board in place.

The bottom of the drive is simply a flat yellow 2x4 plate with the
bumps sanded almost completely off. This was glued on to the brick body.

The entire assembly is the exact size and shape of a regular 2x4 Lego
block (size of a 2x6 with the cap on) and can be stacked like one. The
cap is a 2x2 block resized in a similar fashion to the 2x4 and with a
flat 2x2 plate (with bumps sanded completely off) glued on as a base.
The cap fits on quite snugly due simply to sellotape attatched to the
inner roof of the cap block so the plug does not slide in so easily. 

One cool feature of the drive is a small LED in the circuitry which
flashes red when plugged in to a USB port. It is easily visible when
lit up as the plastic of the body is quite thin. 

An amazing idea for finally putting a use to those tiny Japanese food toy sets I tend to habitually buy anytime I’m near Chinatown.

Why not just make a Lego Drive, you may ask.

What if I store my lifes most important work on it, have a kid, and the kid tries to eat the Lego? (Because I hear that thats what they tend to do….eat things that aren’t food)

I don’t need some drooling vomity kid eating my life!

Other fantistic uses of flash drives are swarming Etsy.

These are a few of my favorites:

Woodtec

Backyard Brand

NifNaks

MikaEle

Tags: computer, crafty, cute, diy, tech, toys, usb

This entry was posted on September 28, 2009 at 3:47 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.