Plastic Housing for USB Stick

Hello,

We need to convert a custom interface to USB. This requires only a small electronic PCB. The most elegant solution would be to fit the PCB into one of the common USB stick housings. We found that Samtec makes USB connectors that can be soldered directly to PCB boards, as the ones used in USB sticks.

What we still look for is a plastic housing, like the ones used for the common memory sticks. Is anybody aware of a manufacturer of a standard plastic housing for that, or is it absolutely necessary to make your own mould (our quantities hardly justify that)?

Thanks, Heiner

Reply to
Heiner Karlin
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Are you prepared to spend approximately $50 on casting compounds sufficient to make about 20-30 of these? Do you have a housing you can copy, assuming you do not care about the IP issues? Or, could you hand-carve/SLA/SLS/FDM a housing of your own to use as a mold pattern?

If so, visit . I suggest OOMOO 25 as the rubber mold compound ($22.00 trial kit is more than enough to make several molds for an object this size) and one of the SC-3xx series resins for the casting (SC-300, 305, 310, 320, 321, 322, see datasheets at ). They also have transparent resins if that is what you need. Making an object with these relatively loose tolerances is not challenging.

Reply to
larwe

Hello,

Thanks for this suggestion.

There are two problems, first, we don't need thousands of this, but a few hundred, so making them by hand is not an option.

Second, we are going to sell this product, so it needs to look professional.

Making a simple mould, even in China, for this part would cost approx.

5000 USD, so, at 100 pieces, 50 USD per piece, which is a little too much. We need to be able to sell the complete part for less than 100 USD.

(Since it is an accessory for a more expensive product we manufacture, we still might make our own mould, if no finished part is available)

Heiner

Reply to
Heiner Karlin

Well, a few hundred is still in the range that I would consider making them by hand, but I suppose we differ on this point. Just an observation, however: you can make a single mold do say 10 of each side. Hence 100 pieces is 10 pulls of the mold, which is to say about

13 hours cure time depending on the resin in use.

You - and your customer - will not be able to tell the difference between a rubber-mold castable urethane prototype and an injection-molded ABS part. (Different material characteristics, obviously, but in the hand or to the eye they simply look like "plastic").

Reply to
larwe

You can probably get small obsolete USB sticks or SD card readers for next to nothing. Maybe buy 100 of them and rework the housings or arrange to buy 5,000 from a manufacturer without markings (and keep the leftovers on the shelf). They hand those things out for free these days as premiums etc.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

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"it's the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward"
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Reply to
Spehro Pefhany

Many places make customized USB memory sticks, custom logos as well as custom shapes, as an example, see

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they have minimum order of 200 for custom shapes so I think they can deal with your ballpark quantity cheaply.

I suspect a place like this that is specifically setup to do only USB sticks will be able to get you a USB shell very quickly (with logo) and much more cheaply as compared to a generic do anything modeling shop, (let us know if this true!). It should also look very professional.

steve

Reply to
steve

Hi Heiner,

I found a company, New Age Enclosures

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that can supply the enclosures from stock--so no NRE if you are OK with their housing. Of course, you can add bells and whistles and do custom stuff too.

FYI, I have no affiliation with the company nor have I seen the sample I requested yet. I know it took me a while to find them so I can maybe save you some time. The biggest problem was the search terms to use as most of the stuff I tried took me to USB assemblies. Now that you have their web page maybe you can use some of their terminology to find others.

Check them out and let me know how it works out--I'd be interested.

Cheers,

James.

Reply to
James Morrison

Hello James,

Without having had a sample in hand, I would say this is exactly what I was looking for. Thank you very much!

I also tried Google before asking, and even found a company that makes plastic housings for MultiMedia Cards, but not for USB sticks.

So, indeed, you saved us a lot of time.

Thanks a lot.

Heiner

Reply to
Heiner Karlin

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