This post shows you the idea and process of making a defused transparant enclosure for a USB stick to use with Blinkit. It's simple to make but the results are fun and will make the led of your stick more visible, it does not require much technical skills to make the modification.
Making the project should not take more than a hour to complete.
There is a lot of room for improvements, and for people their own idea's and input to improve the concept of this DIY project.
Blinkit is a notification software that i released a week ago and it turns any regular USB sticks status LED into a notification light for Steem related actions. No hardware modifications are required to make use of the Blinkit software with your USB Stick.
The ideology of Blinkit is open source software in combination with widely available hardware. Simple modification can make our (old) hardware more functional. and with some cutting and glue we can already have very fun and useful results.
Defusing light and spreading it in different directions and catching it inside a plastic enclosure is a nice way to light up plastic products.
For Blinkit i wanted to do some first experiments with this idea of defusing the LED light and started a small and simple DIY project for Blinkit to see what the effect would be, and to see what is possible with simple materials, materials most people have laying around, or can find easily.
Beside sharing just the pictures of the results of the experiment i also documented the steps for others to get inspired by and to make something similar, and use there own creations with Blinkit.
Things used for this project
- USB stick(s) with Read/Write status LED
- USB extension cable
- Small plastic container/jar
- Sand paper (fine grain)
- (hot)Glue
- Knife
Step 1
Look inside your drawers and find (some) USB stick(s) you maybe have laying around, and see which one have the brightest LED by transferring some data to it.
(The USB stick needs to have a Read/Write status LED)
I used the Lexar S45 (blue led), Toshiba u202 (green led) and a brandless promotional USB stick (red led).
Step 2
Find a nice looking small plastic container or jar that is transparant, and make sure your USB stick can fit inside it.
Most easy would be to find a plastic container/jar that already have defused plastic, but if you only have/can find a fully transparant container, it is also not a problem because with some fine sandpaper the transparant plastic can be turned into defused plastic in no time. The lit of the jar need to be cut out with the dimensions of the USB port.
Step 3
Glue the lit of the jar to your USB extension cable and line up the hole you cut in it. and see if everything fits together, (use hotglue if you want to take it apart later, to reuse the cable or to try different shaped containers.)
Step 4
Test the result and see how it lights up! Download Blinkit and start it with blinkit.exe (detailed instruction ) and set and save your USB stick drive letter, and press the blink button to test the result of your DIY enclosure.
i tested 3 different USB sticks, and decided to remove the plastic case from one of them, the Toshiba u202 to have better result with this DIY project.
If the Led light is somewhat blocked by the plastic case of your USB stick, you could decide to carefully remove the plastic case of your USB stick to better spread the light inside the DIY enclosure.
(This is not required and optional but will improve the visibility of the LED light.)
Toshiba U202 (Some time ago i laser engraved the Steemit logo on it)
First results of what i made with the simple materials i have laying around and the 3 USB sticks i have used and tested
The best results with the sticks i have is with the Lexar S45, it have a very bright blue status light.
The results with a cheap promotional USB sticks of 1 GB, USB 1.0 are also very useful
At this moment Blinkit only support one USB stick(led) at a time, but while working on this post and at the same time finding the USB stick with a red led, the idea and need for adding into a future version the function to set a USB stick(led) for a specific action became stronger.
For example,
- Drive E: have a USB stick with a Green light which Blinkit will activate on new Upvotes
- Drive F: have a USB stick with a Blue LED that Blinkit will activate with new Followers
I'm thinking of, and researching other DIY modifications that can work and benefit the Blinkit project, and will share my findings in future posts, future DIY post could involve more technical improvements, compared to the once in this post.
Hopefully this information,and idea inspire you to try Blinkit and give a new crypto purpose to your old USB flash drive, and experiment with it, and make something similar to use in combination with Blinkit.
Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors