Do you have a gamestick? Is it junk? Are you sorry you shelled out your hard-earned cash for a shitty stick PC and some oversized controllers? Me too!

Worry not however, as there is one saving grace to the GameStick: the GameStick dock!

For those that don’t know, the GameStick dock is a pull-apart docking station that the GameStick fits into, and expands the GameStick I/O options with 2 powered full-sized USB, SD card, and ethernet. There’s also 2 contact pads on the top of the unit for charging the controllers (if your hands are large enough to use them.) Best of all, there’s a power switch that when held in for a couple seconds will cut all power to the unit.

What most don’t know however, is that there is nothing special about the GameStick that makes it work with the dock. It’s simply a powered USB hub with a number of useful additions. The power switch doesn’t interact with the GameStick directly, it just cuts power to the entire unit. This is great, as most android stick computers don’t come with a power switch. This is extremely frustrating for those of us trying to cut down on power consumption, as they’ll just sit in a low power state sucking energy unless you physically unplug them.

At any rate, here’s how you can upgrade your GameStick dock to work with any phone or stick pc. I’ll be using my trusty old iMito MX1 stick PC, but this will also work with any phone or tablet that supports usb host (damn near all of them.)

Grab a screwdriver, and unscrew the 2 screws which are under the foot-pads of the expanding part of the dock.

Now that those 2 screws are out, you can pull the expanding part of the dock wide open. You’ll see that the micro-USB assembly is held on by another 2 screws. Remove them.

At this point, you can pull the micro-usb assembly (which is connected by a flexible wire) back towards the main unit. And that’s everything!

Plug this micro-usb assemble into your device, fire up the unit and you’ve got yourself a nice little docking station with usb and ethernet and an extra SD card all natively supported by the android kernel.

Bonus, it’ll help put you in a good mood after you wasted your money buying an underpowered MK808 dressed up as a cheap gaming console.