OK, I’ve been a little slow in posting this. Chalk it up to classwork and laziness. Sorry.

Project Background

Anyway, the back story for this project is; about 3 years ago, my daughter (around 6 at the time) accidentally spilled a cup of coffee (no she wasn’t drinking it!) onto a brand new Seagate 5GB USB 2.0 Pocket Hard Drive. I had set a cup of coffee down next to the new drive on the coffee table, and needed to go back into the kitchen for something. I specifically warned her to be careful not to bump the coffee or the table because I didn’t want my coffee spilled. Well, that must have triggered some inborn child-instinct that says “be extremely reckless when told to be careful.”

At any rate, the coffee got spilled and I got a chance to get a look at the internals of my new drive while I was drying it out. While doing this, I got to thinking about how small the microdrive was and how it could fit into a lot of different casings. Of course, I was also thinking of how to better protect it from liquid damage and how I had so many - now less useful, smaller capacity - thumb drives laying around.

I thought that if I could get a small enough USB hub that I could fit that inside a piece of PVC or other sealable container and plug the thumb drives into it. With my new drive back together, dry and ready to go, that’s just what I did! After all I had to figure something out to do with all those old thumb drives!

Materials and Build

I got a USB hub and some other pieces and started to work. Of course, all these parts took quite some time to gather. I managed to get a few left over parts from work (sealable caps from network connectors) and ordered a USB-B jack for plugging in a USB-A to USB-B cable into. I could have easily gotten a smaller, mini-USB connector and cable assembly, but my soldering skills are not that hot.

I ordered a 4-port USB hub (to give you some idea of how old this project is, I bought the hub on ThinkGeek and they no longer carry the hub I bought) which had two stacked 2-port USB-A jacks. I also needed some plastic resin to seal the USB jack. I used a 2″ PVC compression coupling as a housing and a couple of 2″ long PVC pipe sections as end pieces.

I removed most of the housing and USB cable from the hub and replaced the USB plug on the cable with the jack I’d gotten. Then I sealed the jack inside the PVC pipe with the plastic resin. Before I did that however, I needed to close the back of the USB jack with a glue stick gun to keep the resin from filling the jack and making it useless. I still ended up getting some inside, but it wasn’t much as I can still insert the USB plug into it.

In order to get all the thumb drives into the tube, I had to strip the housings from them. I used a thin piece of plastic to separate the drives and keep them from performing their own circuit bending operations on any of my data. I had to scrape some tracks into the inside of the compression fitting in order to get the hub’s circuit board in all the way. The other end of the tube was going to hold another USB-A jack, to be used as a kind of feed through USB port, but as it turns out, I didn’t fill the back of that connector correctly and the resin filled the jack. In any event I don’t think the cable connecting the 4th USB port to that jack would have allowed the hub to fit in far enough to fit along with all the drives. So it’s probably better that I just used it for a 4th thumb drive anyway.

The Cable

I also used a piece of conduit as a cable keeper, so that my USB cable doesn’t get tangled with other cables when in transit. I use this trick, albeit with a shorter section of larger diameter conduit, with my laptop cords too. I slit the conduit or take a ¼” strip longitudinally out of the center (depending on rigidity), neatly bundle the cables (folding in half 3 - 4 times), insert into conduit, and viola - instant portable cable minder.

Software

Well all this is well and good, but there’s a problem I didn’t foresee. That would be what a pain in the but this is to unmount all these devices on Windows. With a GNU/Linux system, you simply right a script to unmount the drives all at once (and presumably put that on one of the USB drives), Windows on the other hand, sucks for this kind of functionality. But there is a half-assed solution to the half-assed situation I’ve put myself in. The command:

mountvol X: /d

Where “X” = your thumb drives’ drive letter, works to safely unmount the volume under Windows (thanks and attribution to Joel on Software), but doesn’t solve disconnecting Windows from the device (you still have the little “Safely Remove Hardware” icon on your system tray). So you need the DevCon tool available here. Now you can use the mountvol command and:

devcon remove @usb\*

Conclusion

Hot, no? Actually yes, this set up does get pretty hot after a while. I guess that’s a drawback of having this in a sealed container. Another drawback, I’ll never be able to take this on an airplane… :(

If you’re looking for something to do with all those old USB drives that are getting exponentially smaller with every passing day, then this might be a solution for what to do with your old drives. But I think the next time I do this, I’ll use the left over clear resin and do something a little more slick, like Russell Jones, and encase the whole shebang in a clear plastic block.

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.