Last year I first posted about my 1GB Sonic USB Stick, which I had hacked together from a USB thumb drive and a Doctor Who Sonic Screwdriver toy, but I had a much more lame name for it. Well, I’ve renamed it (see above) and added some finishing touches to the project, itself, so I thought it would be a good excuse to post about it again, but with more pictures. Check em out:

And now for the howto:

This is how the Sonic USB Stick started out life. It’s a PQi 1GB “Mini I-Stick i810″ I picked up from Meritline.com for $14. Get yours here: meritline.com/pqi-1-gb-mini-intelligent-drive.html (they also come in 2GB sizes).

Here’s what it looks like with it’s USB plug open.

Flip this puppy over to access from the bottom end.

I used a Swiss Army knife blade to delicately pry this part off of the main chassis with the hopes of being able to put it back together should my whole project fall apart. (Hey, it’s always a possibility!)

There it is with the bottom part of the frame off and the actual “USB” part of the drive popped out. It came out with almost no effort.

View from above.

Ok, here is the Doctor Who Sonic Screwdriver. I picked it up from Amazon for about the same price as the thumbnail drive. Pick up your own Doctor Who Sonic Screwdriver here from Amazon: urltea.com/1ivy (Special thanks to my pal Edgyspice for bringing one of these back from the UK for me so I could confidently screw this project up and still have a spare ^_^)

Here it is with the cap off. That ballpoint pen nub is swappable with with a marker nub that writes with ink that only shows up under ultraviolet light–the same light that is produced by the other end of the Sonic Screwdriver. However, this is where we’ll be putting the thumbnail drive.

Got Dremel? I think that’s how you spell it. Anyway, so, don’t cut straight through this thing unless you want ink all over you. The plastic is thicker than it looks, but it’s pretty easy to just pick away at it while rotating the Sonic Screwdriver every so often. Also remember to wear safety goggles–little bits of plastic flew everywhere once I dug in.

See? The pen inside is pretty long and would have made a mess if cut straight through by the dremel tool. Dramel? Dremal? Dremmel? Drill-type thing?

OK, here it is all done. Looks just like it did in the beginning, huh? Well, aside from the little bits of plastic everywhere.

Here it is with the USB plug exposed. Sorry, stupidly forgot to take a picture of me dremeling (??) a hole for the thumbnail drive to fit in. I’ve got a close up later, however.

Here’s a closer shot of the USB plug. Looks pretty sweet from this angle, huh?

Here’s the Sonic USB stick plugged into my MacBook. The MB reads it fine, BTW.

Here’s a different angle on the plugged in SUS.

Here’s the promised close up shot on the USB nub. I dremeled down quite a bit of the pen nub to make it look as good as it does. Sadly, it’s still a bit messy for my tastes, but not bad for less than an hour’s work. Over all, I’m quite happy with it. I decided to use JB Weld to fill in this ugly space and make it look nicer.

So, this was the eventual solution to the rough look of the hole the USB plug was sticking out of. JB Weld. It looks great from this angle, but not so much on the flip side.

As you can see, this came out a bit more messy than the other side. Ah well. :\

If you can see in there, using an X-acto blade, I carved a slot for the USB plug to fit. Then I added some wall-tack which helps the nub-cap stay on a bit better.

So, that’s it! Now you, too can have your own 1GB Sonic USB Stick!! Sweet!!