Minimal case for ‘3D sound’ USB sound card

thingiverse

This is a minimalist approach for super affordable '3D Sound' USB soundcards that can typically be found for prices around 1 or 2 Euros or Dollars. These come in an unnecessarily large plastic housing that often makes it difficult to plug other things into neighboring ports, for instance on a Raspberry Pi 3 they block access to two of the other ports. D4rKiTo already created a smaller case, but I wanted one even smaller. The original case on my device was 39×23×12.3 mm. The new one (thinnest model) is 39×18×10 mm, and at the plug end it's only 8 mm thick. To make the circuit board fit, you'll probably need to do some post-processing on the PCB to cut down the pins and solder blobs sticking out from the underside. The easiest way to do this is to (carefully) rub the PCB across sandpaper. The normal model only has 0.75 mm of space under the PCB. The 'extraSpace' model offers 0.5 mm extra, so you can get by with a bit less post-processing. Of course, this makes it 0.5 mm thicker as well, so if you really need all the space, a little bit of extra effort will be needed to use the thinner model. Tolerances are quite tight. Make sure your printer is well calibrated. If the print is too sloppy or tight, scaling up/down the whole model by a fraction of a percent might help. I suspect there are multiple variations on this sound card, and some may have a different PCB design than the one I have, so they may not fit inside this casing. Your mileage may vary! (By the way, these sound cards have no special 3D sound capabilities. They're just bog standard USB audio devices with pretty poor sound quality and power handling that's often incapable of driving a decent set of headphones, but for small projects where quality isn't important, they're unbeatable for their price. In my particular case, this card works very well in my solution to obtain variable fan speed control on a FlashForge Creator Pro.)