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Cheap, easy case for Omega and mini dock



  • (I've been gone for a bit due to nonstop work travel but hopefully I'll be back for a while and able to play with the Omega again!)

    A few weeks ago I was working on a remote control for my video projector. When I finally got around to mounting the projector on the ceiling, I realized I didn't want the Omega just exposed on the end of a wire. Unfortunately, nice small project cases can cost about as much as the Omega itself!

    But fortunately for me, I eat a lot of mints. ("Live fast, die young, leave a minty fresh corpse" is my motto!) And I had a ton of Altoids tins lying around, which got me wondering.

    IMG_20160122_210117.jpg
    Could it possibly fit?

    Lo and behold, it fits wonderfully!

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    A new home for an Omega!

    I spent a few minutes digging through the basement to find my tin snips and attacked the tin.

    IMG_20160122_210311.jpg
    A bit blurry but it's hard to balance a camera and an implement of destruction simultaneously.

    A few minutes later... success!
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    Snug as an onion in a tin, as they say.

    My two worries were that I'd short something due to the exposed solder and traces on the Omega and that I'd built a Faraday cage and would block all WiFi. The first bit was easy: I cut a business card up. Two thirds (folded) went on the bottom, one third on the top.

    IMG_20160122_212048.jpg
    A bit sloppy but nobody will see this part.

    And for WiFi I just closed the lid and tested. And it worked! I lose about 10dBm with the lid closed vs. open, but for my purposes as long as I can send a few bytes to my 3-line PHP webservice I'm all set. Speed really isn't an issue.

    If anyone is really interested in duplicating this, I could probably measure where I put the holes. But really it wasn't difficult to eyeball -- I put the Omega in the tin, put some pencil marks where I thought the USB cables would go, and trimmed until it fit. One thing to note is that I had to cut pretty far down to get everything to work when the lid was closed. And I had to nip just a touch out of the lid on the microUSB side as the cable was just a mm or so too high.

    IMG_20160122_211852.jpg
    Watch those edges! I should really cover them with tape or something.

    But overall this worked better than I'd hoped. The only thing left to do is paint it black to match the projector and I have a perfect unobtrusive web control for my projector!

    IMG_20160122_211922.jpg
    Sweet, sugar-free Onion!



  • My version of a "cheap, easy case for Omega and mini dock"
    is ginger flavored and round as a Omega šŸ˜

    001.jpg
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    The candy boxes lid can be turned and so i get control of heat
    and the LED on the Onion.

    005.jpg

    A good "Swiss Army Knife" is doing the job for punching the holes
    for miniUSB & USB.

    003.jpg

    004.jpg

    Still additional space to store some "smal silica gel bag" if it gets to humid here.
    If i let it run permanently i will probably have no
    problem with the humidity because of getting warm.

    006.jpg

    My momentanious setup is with a 16GB penndrive.
    I will might do some Apache stuff.
    Some additional memory will always be welcome šŸ˜



  • @Luciano-S. LOL, Such a good looking giraffe!



  • Yea, I thought if ppl not like the case, they do at least like the giraffe šŸ˜†
    It is part of my concept to rescue things on my desk. The USB key is so small ...


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