Excuse Me IPad, May I Cut In?

[LostSpawn] loves his clamshell keyboard for the iPad, but he had one major beef with the design. When the tablet is installed in the landscape orientation there’s no way to plug in a dock connector for charging or other uses. He pulled out the cutting tools and altered the case to meet his needs.

The case is a Rocketfish iCapsule which provides a Bluetooth keyboard when you need to do a lot of typing. The hard shell does a great job of protecting the iPad, but who wants to pull it out to charge it? The thing that we can’t believe is that there’s a slot milled in the other side of the bezel so that you can plug in headphones. How did they overlook the dock connector?

To add it himself, [LostSpawn] started by drilling a dotted line along the portion that he wanted to remove. He finished shedding material with a Dremel and then set about sanding it flat. To make sure it didn’t look too much like a hack he used Bondo to build up the working edge and then sanded and painted for a factory finish. Now he can plug in the cable or an SD card adapter like the one seen to the right of the keyboard.

13 thoughts on “Excuse Me IPad, May I Cut In?

  1. Nice idea. A laptop with a relatively small touchscreen. And a keyboard.

    I wonder if someday someone will ever create a computer like that.

    Maybe they could even add a few usb ports, who knows. In a few years, the tech progress may allow to do those wonderful things…

  2. How is this story worthy of hackaday?
    I have an article, it goes like this:
    “The other day I bought a broom. The handle was too long so I drew a line for what size I wanted it to be, then used a hacksaw and some sandpaper to cut it. THE END”
    Now… Where is that tips link?

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