Minimal case for ‘3D sound’ USB sound card

cults3d

This is a minimal case for the very cheap ‘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 impossible to plug other things in neighboring ports, for instance on a Raspberry Pi 3 they block access to two of the other ports. D4rKiTo already made a smaller case, but I wanted an even smaller one. 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 is only 8 mm thick. To make the circuit board fit, you will 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, hence can do 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 you can get, a little bit of extra effort will be needed so you can use the thinner model. Tolerances are quite tight. Make sure your printer is well calibrated. In case 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, and may not fit inside this casing. You mileage may vary! (By the way, these sound cards have no special 3D sound capabilities. They are just bog standard USB audio devices with pretty poor sound quality and power handling that is often incapable of driving a decent set of headphones, but for small projects where quality isn't important, they are 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.)