LinkIt ONE Box Hack

Mediatek's LinkIt ONE board is a great piece of hardware and even comes in fancy colourful box. Inside this box is piece of foam in which the board itself rests. After some weeks of not knowing where to put the micrcontroller while programming and testing it, I came over the idea I am sharing with you in this instructable: modding the foam part of LinkIt ONE's packaging so I don't have to fear breaking off micro USB connector or short circuiting the board.

Start off by flipping foam part so that the deeper part is facing upwards. Mark centre of shorter edge of foam box - it's width is 5.5 cm so you must mark it at half that length from inner edge. Now measure width of your micro USB cable (at connector) and add marks half the width from centre mark you made earlier. My cable was 12 mm wide so I went 6 mm in each side from centre mark.

Now plug your cable into LinkIt ONE board and flip it sidewise (image 2). Try to figure out how much space there is between bottom side of your cable and absolute bottom part of the board. In my case it was about 1 mm and but if you can't guess exact number that is no problem. Now take a look at shortest side. you will see that it is made of three pieces of foam glued together. From top most seam (marked red on image 3) mark same distance as there is from cable to bottom of the board - that is how deep you will have to cut.

You can make marks with pretty much anything as foam dents easily and it takes a while for it to get back to original shape. I made marks with mechanical pencil but if my second option would be olfa knife I was going to use later anyway.

Marks made, it's time to start cutting. Make cuts as seen in second image. try to make them as perpendicular to ground plane as possible as that will look much better. When cutting don't just press down on foam with knife but slide it forward and backwards as that will make for much prettier cuts.

The third cut is a bit trickier. Having a sharp knife helps a lot. with tip of the blade touch where you want cut to start (where one of previous two cuts ended) and press into the foam. Don't use too much force as you don't want to damage the foam. Repeat this until you get through foam wall and can get that bit out.

Sorry for not providing any images for the third step but I only have two hands...

Now that main part is done it's time to talk what else could be done. If you want to use audio jack, you will also have to cut a hole for that and same goes for battery (but you won't have to cut out a whole hole - a simple vertical notch for cables will do). You won't have to do anything for antennas as you can easily twist cables out of the box.

Have fun coding and see you next time!