Chosen Solution
I’ve barely used the thing and yesterday I tried to unplug it from the usb port and the housing totally fell apart. The board is intact. I may be missing a tiny piece of plastic so I don’t think I can put it back together as it was. But can I still use it somehow? Don’t care how ugly it looks.
How it looks in the first pic is the best I could do but the board is loose inside. Doesn’t work.
If it was mine and it still works when plugged in… I would just put some shrink wrap tubing over the IC component end and continue to use as is without all the flimsy pieces that fell off. You might have to trim a small piece of metal of the same gauge as the original metal part that came off and super glue it to the non-contact side of the circuit board to get an effective connection too! Pretty trivial to do though. Kinda like the infrared capture device I bought a few years ago when I was wanting to unify the three or four IR remotes associated with my AV equipment. This device came with just a naked circuit board and a female USB mini-a connector on the board… In the picture…. Left top item IR Adapter LEFT bottom USB mini-a to std USB-A adapter. Also quite a few modern USB-A dongles forgo the silly metal bits altogether. Just don’t apply too much weight/pressure or you will be buying another device (applies to the ones with the metal rims too like yours as you have found out apparently! Right item Yubikey 5 NFC USB A dongle.
assemble it back and get electrical tape and wrap it around the dongle but only where the black part is and make a little part of the tape and put it onto the edge of the dongle
