A Cheap and Easy Fix for a Missing DS Lite Slot 2 Cover
...assuming you have access to a 3D printer...
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Back in 2020, I picked up a cobalt blue Nintendo DS Lite to add to my console collection. I don’t use it all that much as I don’t have any real nostalgia for this era of gaming, though I have used it more over the last few months as my DS game collection has grown a bit. When I dropped out of the gaming scene the Game Boy Advanced was the top dog and the original, chunky DS had just been announced. Still, it’s a part of gaming history and I wanted to have it.
The DS Lite itself is also just a good thing to have as it fixed a lot of the problems with the original DS. While it’s not as powerful as it’s successor, the DSi, it’s more powerful than it’s predecessor and still has the physical slot for GBA games. Like countless others, my DS Lite was missing the small plastic cover that is supposed to cover that slot. Of course, you can buy replacements on places like eBay or Amazon for $10-20, but I didn’t want to spend that kind of money on a little piece of plastic that wasn’t even necessary. Instead, I got to thinking.
The Practicality of a Small, Cheap, 3D Printer
My kids have this nifty little 3D printer called a Toybox. It’s a nice little printer with it’s own store of cool little toys you can print. We’ve had it for several years now and they have used it to make gifts and crafts for themselves as well as their friends. We’ve had very few issues with it over that time and it’s print quality is actually pretty good. The Toybox app is very simple and straightforward, but it also gives you options to do custom prints and import files from elsewhere. So I found my way over to Thingiverse and found an STL file from user jwags55 and imported it into the Toybox app.
I’m sure I could have adjusted things in the app to make it perfect, but I don’t really know how that all works so I just went with the defaults. The print only took about 4 minutes, and here is the result.
It’s not an exact match to the original, but it does the job. I went with the black filament (or printer food as Toybox calls it and the color was pretty much a match for the bottom of this DS Lite.
Overall I’m very pleased with how this spontaneous little project went and I’ve started thinking about what other things I can use our printer for. If you have other tech projects that you’ve used a 3D printer to pull off, be sure to let me know about them.
