Recycled USB Sticks – Great for DT Projects

With many students starting back to school this week it’s going to be an exciting time for many as they start in new schools, new classes and embark on new courses and subjects. Of course many will have just advanced a year in the same school and will be glad to get back into the routine (hopefully).

If you’re a teacher and you’re eagerly anticipating the arrival of this year’s cohort then good luck to you. Hopefully all of your preparation work is done and it’s just a question of putting your well-honed plan into action.

If you’re specialism is Design Technology (DT) and you’re still looking for assignment ideas then you might want to give some thought to setting your students the challenge of coming up with a new design for a USB stick. Despite the popularity of cloud based storage solutions like Dropbox and i-Cloud millions of USB memory sticks are still bought every year in the UK alone. They may be losing popularity in some sectors but the promotional market has taken to them with renewed vigour.

Part of the appeal is the falling price – it’s now possible to pick up fully branded (printed or engraved) USB sticks for well under £2.00 per unit (depending on memory size and the order value) so all of a sudden they’re in the “cheap and cheerful” giveaway category albeit they still deliver a range of valuable USP’s that other promotional gifts simply cannot match.

Build Your Own USB Flash Drive

With thousands of different designs/styles of USB sticks available the challenge for any reseller of USB sticks is to come up with something different, something that will carry a printed brand or logo and something that looks good – in essence it’s a sector crying out for continuous innovation in terms of product design.

So, if you’re a DT teacher and you want to set your students a challenge then why not ask them to design and build a new range or collection of USB memory sticks that might appeal to various sectors of the promotional market or if you want to keep it simple to design a USB stick that the school could use or perhaps the students could sell to local businesses.

Inside any USB sticks is a simple flash memory module, a controller chip and a capacitor. These are typically attached to a Printed Circuit Board (PCB) and attached to the PCB is a USB connector. All of this is then “wrapped” in a shell (the design) to give it an attractive, portable and easy to use form factor.

The internal USB PCB’s are readily available from USB2U who can supply new versions or versions that have been stripped out of USB sticks that are no longer wanted or more commonly are taken from new USB sticks that have had the wrong logo printed on them (there are new but are classified as re-cycled because they will have signs of glue etc. on them).

Of course if you buy re-cycled USB sticks for your DT project they’ll be much cheaper!