Fixing Terrible Soldering Job on a USB Hub

/***** WARNING *****/
DO NOT BUY A 7-PORT USB HUB FROM LINK DEPOT, AND COMPANY NAME IS: SHENZHEN HEXING.

What the box looks like, I wouldn't buy one

It is the worst quality I have ever seen!

Ok, so I'll keep everything I say rated "PG-13" and not say what I want to, but this was very irritating to get a product and have such low quality of manufacturing.  This is going to be more of a rant/warning that a tutorial.

I got this USB hub because I needed more USB ports to use for my Raspberry Pi, which only has 2, which are being used by a keyboard and mouse; I needed one more for file exchange.  Lots of USB hubs support Windows and Apple, but few mention Linux support.  I was wary getting one online and waiting a long time, so I saw one at my local Fry's and it looked good...on the outside...

To start off, the box itself was broken(!), I don't know how or why, but it's terrible quality control.  It was chipped and broke open when I tried to insert a USB stick into it!  Then thinking well, I might as well look at the PCB since the box is open know, what harm could be in that?  A LOT of harm!  Looks like someone deliberately tried to make a terrible quality product.

Note the holes in upper left and going across

The pins for the 5V DC power connector *WEREN'T EVEN FULLY SOLDERED*, as in one had no solder at all!  5 holes in total were on the board, atrocious soldering.  Also looked like someone burned the board a bunch of times or scratched it.  Then the LED was glued so cheaply to try and secure it in place; didn't work at all, terrible craftsmanship.

In short, it looked like a homemade hack, not an engineered product fit for commerce.

So to fix this disaster as best as I can, I want to at least fill in the missing solder holes.  The hub still powers up and works, but just looks terrible and may malfunction eventually somehow electrically due to terrible quality.

Tools needed:
--Solder iron and solder

1) Using basic soldering techniques, hold the hot iron on the corner for a few seconds, then push solder on and let the solder fill in and remove when it looks like a "shiny volcano" of metal.  That's it, repeat for the remaining holes.  In my case I had to use a lot of solder to fill the massive holes they left.

Hard to see, but bottom right is a well solder joint

Top, again hard to see...

2) Since the box won't hold together and come apart anytime I try to push in a USB stick, you have to glue the box together with a glue gun or you can wrap a few strong rubber bands around it.

Fixed PCB, still looks bad

Apologies for the bad pictures, I may re-do them at a later time, with a better camera and lighting.  Be careful when getting barebones cheap electronics from China, I've been burned other times before and some people have even *died* from fraudulent power supplies.  That is very evil and criminal and should never happen in this day and age.

Fixing Too-Small Screw-holes on 3D-Printed Box

Way back a couple years ago, I thought I'd ask my professor if I could design a 3D-printed enclosure using software we had just learned to use (Pro-Engineer, which from what I've heard isn't the best software to use for CAD-projects).  The response was yes!  So I set out measuring my passive-infrared (PIR) kit I'd gotten earlier and thought on how to make the design to hold a speaker and the PCB well.  The kit just takes 5V in and activates a speaker during detection (a "ding-dong" noise).  Took a lot of measurements, and a mistake I made was that I didn't look for proper screw sizes BEFORE designing the screw holes; I assumed I'd be able to find a screw that would work easy.

I won't be sharing the files for the box, but the box is simplistic enough (by design) to be able to copy easily if you want, it doesn't matter to me.  I was pushing for symmetry about the "Y-axis", as in you could fold it over and it would be the same.  I really liked being able to see the precision of working with CAD software and re-creating that with a 3D-printer.  It's better to see in person, but you can see some of the tiny edges that were needed for the screen on front and holding the speaker in the back.  The speaker would sit behind the PCB and be held in by that strip of plastic you see in the middle of the circle.  The PCB would be screwed in and held up by those 4 circles.

 Didn't come out perfectly though, measurements were slightly off ever though I painstakingly measured again and again.  Screw holes didn't line up and were too small.  So some advice for the readers, make sure the parts you need exist (or are easily found) BEFORE you design something needing those parts.  Sounds like common sense, but you may make the same silly mistake in the haste of trying to get things done.

Tools needed:
--Dremel tool
--Mounted pillar drill
--Wire cutters (for bits of hanging plastic)
--Proper diameter and length screws (whatever needs for your project)
--Fine-toothed hack saw

1) Started off thinking this was a job for the dremel tool, in the process learning that a dremel (at least the one I have) isn't very good for plastic.  For starters, it melts plastic and gets stuck on the drill bit and hardens to very difficult-to-remove plastic on the drill bit.  It's best to use a more powerful drill, like a mounted pillar drill; it just works better/quicker.

Be cautious and wear safety glasses when working with a pillar drill as the plastic still melts to the drill bit and then flings off at high speeds.

I also needed to make the bottom part a little bigger for the power wires at the bottom.  Found the best way to do that was using a hack saw, making a bunch of cuts close together, then coming in with the pillar drill to cut out the pieces.

2) After drilling out all the outside holes and testing the screws I had on hand (size 6, 1.5 inches long), I had some other screws that fit easily for holding the PCB in place.  I only needed to put in one here as the PCB already fit snug and if there are any problems (highly unlikely unless someone hits it hard) I can always drill out the PCB a little to make up for my faulty measurements on the screw holes.

3) After securing the PCB, make sure the screws fit snug on the outside and you can tighten and loosen them repeatedly with no problem.  The solid plastic print (you have an option to do a "solid print" or a "hollow print") for 3D-printing held up moreso than I thought it would.  The drilling likely melted some of it around the screw holes, making it slightly stronger for screws.

That's essentially it, just some manual work, it'd be better to see if I could film what I'm doing as I don't have pictures using the drill (probably a bit of a safety hazard to try filming yourself and using a drill :p) but that may come at a later time.  Also, I was having some issues for the first time with my camera and I couldn't get the best pictures.

Regardless, here's the put-together final product:

Installing Adobe Flash to LiveUSB Kali Linux

This tutorial will be very easy and straight-forward, documenting it here mostly so I can find it quickly if I need to.  For the most part, you can get away these days without having to install Adobe Flash Player (notoriously bad for allowing all kinds of malware to take over your computer).  However, a website that is used by my school for doing homework, requires you to have Adobe Flash installed (just for certain parts, I could still get around that requirement to get credit).

So we can mitigate this risk by using a Live system, that is one that runs in RAM and has all bootloader/kernel/config files on either a CD/DVD or USB-stick. Using Adobe Flash for whatever reason you have to, then the download gets stored in RAM and is promptly wiped on shutdown.

Note that there is already a tutorial (which I did but was way more painful than this simple method), but there's a much easier way to get what you need. 

http://lewiscomputerhowto.blogspot.com/2013/10/how-to-install-adobe-flash-player-in.html

Don't laugh at how easy this is, ok? :)

Tools needed:
--Computer capable of running Kali Linux (likely most other linuxes too) with decent amount of RAM (1 GB let's say)
--An internet connection

1) Open up a terminal, type: "apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree"

You will see quite a bit of activity, lots of files downloaded.  Takes about 30 seconds to a minute to complete.

2) Once downloaded, update the plugin by typing: "update-flashplugin-nonfree --install"

That's all there is to it!  Be mindful of the spacing!  Very simple and painless and you can go do whatever you need with Adobe Flash and then shutdown to erase it (which you can verify by trying to access sites requiring Flash).