JSAUX teasing a clear Back Plate for the Steam Deck

QuoteI'm surprised it actually took any company this long

I'm not suprised
- Steamdeck CAD files are under "Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License". This is clearly commercial usage, so they needed communication with Valve for get permission and Valve maybe came with some strings attached (material quality,...).
- In addition, the mould for this requires more precision than the for Dock and therefore production may take longer.
- This is niche product. Only small group from SteamDeck owners want to change backplate in comparison with who want dock, so priority is low.

I'm strongly reminded of those snap-on clear covers that seem to get trotted out for every handheld going... (As an aside, those always look brittle to me, especially the ones for larger devices - do people really use them?)


Last edited by Pengling on 3 November 2022 at 11:34 am UTC

Quoting: Arten- Steamdeck CAD files are under "Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License". This is clearly commercial usage, so they needed communication with Valve for get permission and Valve maybe came with some strings attached (material quality,...).

You raise a good point, hopefully JSAUX are smart enough to know this before putting the work in...

I wonder if they'll offer different colours. It's a long shot, but I'm hoping for cyan and sparkly like the Pokemon Crystal case.

As an added difficulty there is a high probability that you need different moulds for clear and opaque back plates due to different shrinkage.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/yezsht/steam_deck_resin_shell_not_too_far_off/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

Quoting: Liam Dawe

Quoting: Arten- Steamdeck CAD files are under "Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License". This is clearly commercial usage, so they needed communication with Valve for get permission and Valve maybe came with some strings attached (material quality,...).

You raise a good point, hopefully JSAUX are smart enough to know this before putting the work in...

As far as I know, the CAD files only properly represent the outside of the device. All the little things on the inside are still up for 3rd party to measure themselves. For the backplate, this is gonna be very very important, since it's part of the cooling strategy,

I'm hoping they make a metallic back, either aluminum or magnesium, that also has a plate to mate with the heat spreader to dissipate extra heat without messing up the internal airflow.