Its a snowy winter morning... Too much snow falling to shovel, not much going on elsewise. What better thing to do than to hack together what may be one of the smallest LEGO USB Memory sticks out there (for now).
I was perusing through the local Canadian Tire sales ad and found that they had 50% off Gizmo Jr. USB memory keys. Not as hot of a deal as it seems. The price was pretty much on-par with what other retailers
are selling them for - so I picked up the 2 gig model for this project. For a while now, I wanted to hack something like this together since it has been done a number of times.
Materials:
2x3 LEGO plates - any colour will do. I used blue and black.
1 Gizmo Jr.™ USB Memory key - any size capacity should do (the 1 and 2 GB models have the same physical dimensions).
Glue, knife or dremel, a steady hand and lots of patience.
I lucked out when choosing this memory key as was a perfect fit for the inside dimensions of a LEGO brick or plate. No modifications to the side walls had to be done. There was approx.
0.5 to 1.0 mm of play between the key and the inside wall of the plate after I carved out the cylinders and the wall section that it protrudes from (see pics below). Better yet, the height
of the key is a fraction of a hair larger than the internal height of the plate underside. This allowed the second (black) to be glued directly to the underside with no modification. Can
you say "Easy Button".
In all, this mod took about 20 minutes with a knife and Krazy glue. The only casulaties were my fingers getting roughed up due to the amount of force I had to use to "cut" the internals of the
blue plate. A dremmel would make this trivial...
The complete unit is a bit larger than a quarter and smaller than a loonie.
Here is a side view of the key showing both plates. Can you say SNOT (AFOL's know what Im talking about).
Another angle...
Key mounted in first plate. You could stop here, but then the underside would not be that nice looking. After making sure the fit was good, the key was glued to this plate.
The key was a perfect fit for the insides of the plate. A little Krazy glue at the corners and its in there for good!
The memory key in my new (very small) ASUS eee PC 4G. Does the memory key seem big? Don't let the size confuse you - Google "eee PC" to see how small this UMPC is!
