Created
11/04/06

Materials
- hardcover book
- cheap USB flashdrive
- mini-B USB receptacle
- epoxy
- sharp hobby knife

In this fun but somewhat impractical extension of the tried-and-true booksafe, I sought to embed a USB flashROM drive and a USB mini-B connector into an innocuous-looking book, such that the book could be connected to a computer and used for data storage just like a flashdrive. Why impractical? It did occur to me while making this that the traditional booksafe, which is simply a book with a hollowed-out cavity inside, could simply be used to conceal a flashdrive. Nonetheless, I liked the idea of making a book with a data port.

The flashdrive was selected by one merit alone: cost. Staples sold me this wimpy little 64 MB drive for about $7.00 one day. I knew right then and there that this flashdrive was doomed to go under the surgeon's knife. The innocuous book is a Gideon's Bible, undoubtedly stolen from a cheap motel room somewhere, which I found at a rummage sale. I think they wanted a dime for it. Cutting up a Bible is probably some sort of sacrilege in some people's eyes. I find sacrilege hilarious, so this was the obvious pick. Also, when one wishes to hide something in a book, one choses a book other people are unlikely to pull off a bookshelf - few of my friends would be likely to pick this book out of a collection.

The mini-B receptacles cost $1.40 each from Mouser Electronics. Note that they have five conductors instead of four. I was sure to use an A-to-mini-B cable to trace the pin connections.

I freed the flashdrive's soul from its aluminum shell. On one side of the board is the flash chip, marked "DFM512W0E"> I noted the '512' in the name and the large number of unused pins, and felt quite a bit cheated. Even moreso when, upon flipping the board over, I noted a roughly flash-chip-sized void where another chip was obviously meant to go. The only other chip on the board is the USB interface controller, a USBest "UT161".

I removed the USB-A plug from the board so I could get to the contact points just behind it. Then I soldered ~3 cm lengths of wrapping wire to the four used pins at the back of the mini-B socket, and one to the metal of the socket shroud. These I then soldered to their proper counterparts on the board. Honestly I gave it odds of 50-50 on whether it would work or not; all my previous experience with USB lines run for even short distances outside of their shielded cables have led me to see USB as rather finicky. This homunculus worked fine when I plugged in my camera's USB cable though, so I proceeded to entomb it in the book.

The two necessary hollows in the book pages were made with a nice sharp X-Acto hobby knife. You can't see it in the pics, but about ten pages down the stack I connected the two hollows with a shallow canal for the wires. I cemented the board and connector in place by packing the voids with Supermend, a general-purpose household epoxy cement and filler. I tried not to let any epoxy seep into the mini-B connector's various crevices, but I was not completely successful. In the end I had to place a mini-B cable plug in the socket while I let the epoxy cure, and hoped that I would be able to unplug it later. It took some tugging, but it came free the next morning, and the socket worked fine!

Here is a picture of the socket taken before the epoxy cured, and a picture of my new bookdrive connected to my computer via a mini-B cable. The Bible is still usable, so long as you don't want to read anything between the start of Psalms and the start of Malachi. At last I can finally realize my dream of storing lots of low-quality porn inside a Bible.