Despite the seat of honor it enjoys in literally millions of households, the official Nintendo Switch Dock is certainly far from perfect. For one, it’s not milled out of a hefty block of aluminum. A less apparent but no less important issue is that the ports are positioned kind of awkward – [Kevin] from Modified believes that the USB ports should be facing the front side, while the HDMI, Ethernet, and charging inputs should be on the backside — a reasonable position. He set out to fix both of these problems at the same time, and tells us the CNC-heavy rebuild story in a short but captivating video.
The original dock consists of two PCBs, and these two boards are the only thing [Kevin] didn’t redesign from scratch. As they’re connected with a flexible cable, he could freely rotate and thus completely reposition the ports-equipped board without soldering. He added some standoffs to secure this board to the case, and after 3D printing a few iterations for test-fitting, the milling went on for all of us to marvel at.
The resulting dock is pretty, functional, and even has some extra features — for instance, the “i” in the embossed Nintendo logo lights up when the dock is in use. In no small part due to the Nintendo logo, we don’t expect this one to grace store shelves, but we hope that it provides inspiration to other makers to do their builds. If you like this rebuild and crave more, whether you’re looking for inspiration, CNC work insights, or pretty milling videos, [Kevin]’s milled Xbox case project is an excellent “Watch next” choice.
sounds like a perfect way to scratch your swith… it does look great, but the same in plastic?
Shouldn’t be too bad from the scratch potential as nearly all the edges have really deep chamfer that means to the switch its pretty much the same as being put down on a giant flat table, really large flat smooth surfaces don’t scratch the same way sharp corners can.
I would have liked the see the chamfer run all the way around at the bottom of the slot too, but by that point the switch should be well aligned to the back of the dock so the sharper corners in the bottom of the slot can’t scratch it (assuming all burs from machine are removed).
And if you go and make it from plastic it just isn’t as impressive to look at. That said I’d love to see that same CAM applied to a pretty dense wood burl, the natural swirly wood grains would be a really cool counterpoint to the more angular dock design. Plus wood looks nicer than plastic, if you are going to design a dock to show off your switch it really should look the part! (Though why anybody would want to show off a switch anymore I am uncertain, it being now a very low end and very very expensive to game on platform)
Or just get a Basstop enclosure. I never went back. Really there is no contender here