I’ve had an idea bouncing around in my head for the better part of a year: packing a USB switch and an RP2040 into one of the stock USB-C card enclosures.
Today, I finally decided to make it a reality. I cleared my schedule, went through a focused 12-hour design session, and sent the files off to JLC for manufacturing. Now comes the waiting part—first to see how the production goes, and then, of course, to see if it works as expected!
The board I designed is a custom setup with an RP2350, 16MB of storage, and a USB 2.0 switch, all designed to fit perfectly into the original pass-through card enclosure. As a fun bonus, it can be programmed to act as a “BadUSB,” which opens up some interesting possibilities.
For anyone who wants to see the technical details, I’ve put everything up on my GitHub and also some progress pictures on my instagram stories.
Cool design! Nice to see other RP2350 cards! How will the buttons be reachable though? I have seen MCU card designs like that where buttons are on the center of the card, but I am unsure how they are reached and, if reachable from bottom, not pressed by mistake while card is connected. I would put vertical buttons near sides of female type-c so they would be pushable easily while card is still intact.
As for the price, haven’t you considered sponsorship from PCB manufacturers? Many like NextPCB do that, albeit with lesser production capabilities so you can’t use default template that is too fine for their machines to cut.
Buttons only for programming, so you connect it to the normal type-c card, flash with lid open, enclose it fully and give to your wife, so when she connects it, her browser opens a Porsche 911 website .
I usually do partnerships with JLC, but this time I really wanted to make it 1 day project.
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