I decided a few months ago that for my brother’s Christmas present this year I was going to get him a USB drive. I’d also been toying around with putting it into a hollow book with a USB hub. Since then I’ve been gathering the bits and pieces I’d need to complete the project. I got a really good deal on a 4 Gb thumb drive from Buy.com using Google checkout, I picked up a longish USB hub at Wally World, and there’s a local used book store where I was able to get a nice little hardbound book to put it all in. Then, a couple of weeks ago, Make had a podcast on creating a secret compartment book as their weekend project. That’s when I decided I needed to get started (Christmas was right around the corner!!).

I started with a larger book as a prototype to get a feel for hollowing out a book and to better understand the process. This book as well as the one I found for this project were both on the free shelf at Edward McKay’s used books in Winston-Salem. I started out with an X-Acto knife, but as the cuts got deeper I had to switch to a longer bladed knife in order to keep the cuts straight (you get a tendency to start angling towards the outside of the book if you try cutting with a regular knife). After I finished, I had some really uneven sides, so I used felt to cover them, looks pretty good after everything was said and done.
The Book

After I’d let my blisters heal a bit, I started on the real thing. I needed to make several different cuts to get all the features I wanted. I started with the main compartment which was “L” shaped, then created the compartment for the USB hub and the cord. I had to wait quite a while between each compartment because the glue was taking forever to dry. The book dates from 1945, and the paper was very spongy so it ended up absorbing a lot of the glue and took longer to dry. I used the microwave to speed drying, I used 15 second cook times on high, after which I’d remove the book and make sure to press the pages together to make sure they didn’t wrinkle and allowed the book to cool (nothing like the smell of hot, musty book). Then I put weight back onto it to let it finish drying .

After all the cuts were made I found that in order to use Velcro as a fastener for the hub cover, I needed a better glue to keep the Velcro from ripping apart the glued pages. I found that either Super Glue or Krazy Glue worked pretty well (although I found Super Glue worked better because it didn’t discolor the pages as much). This pretty much gave me solid chunks of wood to work with. I also used these glues on the hub cover’s edges to keep the act of opening the cover from ripping the cover apart. It also gave me a good base to stick the Velcro to.

I used a strip of plastic (from a clamshell package) under the hub to insulate the circuitry from the glue - Super Glue and/or Krazy Glue, I’ve found (although I haven’t tested both and I can’t remember which does) can conduct electricity after drying.

The Software

With 4 Gb of free space, I would be remiss if I didn’t add some software right off the bat! I installed pretty much everything available from PortableApps.com, the PC Repair System from Daily Cup of Tech and the small version of the Wikipedia for Schools (downloadable Wikipedia, awesome!) - see links below for access to these softwares. All that cool software and still around 2.5 Gb or free space! W00t! I also created a custom, one of a kind icon which appears (as described above) in the system tray and in Windows Explorer (also in Linux if you configure it properly) as the drive icon.

I used ASuite as a menuing system, to load with the autorun.inf. ASuite is a nice little Start Menu style system tray icon that gives you full access to the applications on your thumb drive. I like the DCoT Menu, PortableApps menu and PMenu (on which, I believe ASuite is based), but you can’t change the default icon in the system tray or make other customizations available from ASuite.

Hope he likes this!!

Links

Make Magazine -Secret Book Weekend Project
Buy.com Kingston 4GB DataTraveler
Super Glue
Krazy Glue
Velcro USA
X-Acto
Edward McKay’s Used Books and More
PortableApps.com (application list)
Daily Cup of Tech (PC Repair System page)
SalvadorSoftware (ASuite SourceForge page), SalvadorSoftware, if you’re listening, please port ASuite from Borland to Lazarus from Free Pascal. I’ve tried several times, unsuccessfully, to load all the dependencies for ASuite into Lazarus, but it just won’t compile! :(
Wikipedia for Schools at SOSChildrensVillages.org.uk

Next

Next time, my waterproof USB thumb drive enclosure project.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 24th, 2007 at 7:36 pm and is filed under Projects. 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.