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(145 votes) Published: Oct 28, 2008 9:18 p.m. In 4 Favorites Lists Viewed 1064 times
Do you have top secret information? Need to keep it from prying eyes?
You can make...
A Working USB
Micro SD Drive Mouse!
I made an Egg recently on how to hide a thumb drive in an old ball mouse, but that’s all it was. A drive in a mouse shell. I liked it. It works. Some people pointed out that their parents might throw it away... So, it was suggested that a working USB mouse would be better (thanks, Right_Hand!). I looked into it, and directly splicing two USB devices to a single USB port has problems. You can’t switch between the mouse and any other USB device without it locking up.
So I found a tiny hub. The smallest hub I could find. Once the casing is removed, it’s small enough to fit in the mouse shell. The original plan was to put a 1Gb and a 4Gb flash drive in with it, but I ran out of room, so I went with a micro SD card and a reader. They should be tiny enough to fit...
ON with the Egg...
Here’s the original materials:
I used:
my USB optical mouse
4-port 2.0 USB hub and wire (Dealextreme.com, $5.92)
1Gb Micro SD card (Dealextreme.com, $5.29)
Tiny micro SD card reader (Dealextreme.com, $1.58)
I didn’t use the two flash drives in the pic. No matter what I did, they wouldn’t fit. Hopefully I will use them in a future Egg.
Tools are the same as in my previous Egg:
Phillips head screwdriver
Needle nose pliers
Razor knife
Soldering iron
Solder
Electrical tape
First thing I did was strip the hub:
(images are clickabe)
I wound up removing three of the four USB ports:
(Two removed here...)
Next, I opened my mouse...
...and cut the wire. I left about 6 inches so I could mount the hub without worrying about the wire length:
*The following image is incorrect... The wire colors are wrong. I mixed up the green and the white. The proper order is red, white, green, black. I forgot to take a pic after fixing it...*
I stripped and soldered the wires from the connector on the mouse board to one of the USB hub ports, directly to the board. I used the contacts that were in the connector:
(Should be red, white, green, black!)
Then taped each connection. I popped the micro SD card in the reader, and put it in the one remaining USB port.
I also cut the USB cable that came with the hub. I stripped the wires, and spliced and soldered them to the corresponding wires from the mouse’s original USB wire (with the original plug...):
So now, the original mouse wire connects to the USB hub. I routed it the way it was when I opened it, so it can’t pull out.
Now, I knew it was going to be tight, so I made some clearance in the mouse shell. There were some plastic ’walls’ in the way (green arrows), so I grabbed them with my pliers and twisted them off:
I plugged everything in, and it worked (after switching the white and the green wires... :-P), so I taped it all up, and stuffed it (carefully) into the mouse, tucking the wires into place with a toothpick:
(It was kinda hard to see, so I outlined it in green...) I put the screw back in the bottom of the mouse, plugged it in, and rebooted my computer... That’s it...
It worked! It took a little longer than normal for the computer to find the mouse, but it works great.
(LoL, pic of screen! X-D)
Now, to further protect your data, download and install an encryption program such as TrueCrypt (free, and works with Windows, Linux, and Mac).
Now you’re the only one who knows where your drive is, and you are the only one who can access the information on the drive.
Thanks for reading, and as always, leave a message!
Oct 29, 2008 5:47 am - Great egg, surely an example of the type of egg that gets noticed, gets rated highly and makes the egg page look good. Now if only a bunch of other members would do as well.
Absolutely, anything less than a 5 would be ridiculous.
Oct 29, 2008 6:39 am - Lawl@Kipkay... I love him. Kipkay=awesome.
Right_Ha d, yeah... That challenge was already presented in the last Egg by NOF. I am still mentally working on it. I opened my wireless mouse after he mentioned it, and wow... Not much room in there. However, I can make a little more room by switching to a 3.7V battery instead of two 1.5V batteries... It will be quite a challenge, because I want to keep the assembly simple and easy...
Thanks for the ratings! :-D
I agree with right_hand, if we were churning out eggs of this quality the egg section would soon be great again. I feel inspired, but I just have no idea what to do an egg on... I need to think of ideas.....
But this egg and Shadygrey’s blacklight egg have set a very high standard, if I want to follow it I’ll have to do something special...
I’m kinda restricted in what I can do right now cause of my shattered leg, and the fact I’m staying at my dads and have nothing with me apart from clothes and my (shit) laptop. Still thinking.....
O t 29, 2008 5:24 pm - this is a great egg, and i agree with right_hand and everyone else that people should stop complaining about shitty eggs and actually make a good one. which is why ive got an idea that ive already started and hopefully it will be an egg in the next week or two, depending on how long it takes to finish.
anyways 5*’s for this.
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