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.

Yesterday started banally enough - morning routine and all. Then I looked outside the window. It had rained, which means all that raking and leaf blowing I did over the weekend was all for naught.

When I talked to my wife from work, she mentioned that she was having some problems with connecting to our home network with her laptop. I told her to unplug the wireless router and plug it back in again (things would be so much easier with a little “reset” on these things - manufacturers, take note!).

On the way home my truck’s check engine light came on. Okay, no major problem yet, I’m still able to drive for now. After I got home that evening I decided that I’d see if my wife was still having problems. That started a lovely, 4 hour ordeal that I’m loath to repeat.

As it turns out, her wireless card wasn’t working anymore, and Vista, being that sterling example of how not to design an OS or GUI, was of little help. We’ll just have to wait and see if it’s still under warranty with HP for replacement parts, otherwise I’ll be picking up a new mini-pci card for her. As a temporary measure I tried adding a wireless USB dongle (hehehe “dongle”), but Vista Home Premium (I know those words, but when you put them together like that, I just don’t understand them) didn’t have the drivers built-in (huh, go figure). So I tried to download them on my laptop. Thus started phase two of my evening - wireless router troubleshooting.

The wireless router has been acting wonky for a few weeks now, netstumbler has been reading the wireless access point as, not only the programmed SSID, but the SSID and a random string of characters on every probe. Which is weird because I have it set not to broadcast the SSID to begin with, so the fact that it’s identifying itself that was is troubling. Long, story short I spent the next couple of hours trying to get my crappy, spare wRouter working (f**k you D-Link, f**k you very much). Ah the joys of a web interface that isn’t compatible with Firefox (’nuff said).

After I got that working (I’m leaving out the part about trying to upgrade the firmware in a futile attempt to get the UI to work with Firefox, heaven forbid that I try to manage it from something other than Windows), I tried to connect to the internet. No, that didn’t work either. I accessed my DSL modem, and ran diagnostics and pings from there. No DNS, huh. I tried calling BellSouth - no… sorry, the “new” AT&T (which is to say the old AT&T, just with less customer care). The customer service number was of no help, everyone was gone because it was after hours (but what if I have a problem?! what - no helpful message telling me who to call after hours for service? oh well). Then I found the number for the internet support, oh good. That worked, eventually - when I finally got a line (yes, for 20 minutes I wore my redial button clean of letters because they didn’t have the number of phone lines to cover the number of customers calling in - let me make this clear, the PHONE COMPANY didn’t have the lines to cover the call volume - that should give you an idea of the size of the problem). Turns out the prerecorded message said they were having a “region wide problem” and that customer service techs (?) didn’t have any more details.

Eventually, my internet was restored (at least they new how to fix the problem and got things going in a “timely” manner), I got to the internet and got the drivers I needed. While I was pulling my hair out (what little is left) I saw news reports (my TV/cable was working at least, although one of the local channels faded out a couple of times…) about the North East and West coasts getting pounded by extreme whether. That’s when I thought about how even though I was stuck in my little corner of hell, I was still better off pulling my hair out with these smaller problems than those poor bastards who were getting snowed in or flooded out. I guess it’s all a matter of perspective.