 |
| I hadn't taped it yet, hence the rubber bands. |
Today I got around to making a case for my Raspberry Pi. I liked the idea of still being able to see the circuit board and components, so I wanted a transparent case. The most conveniently available, viable, transparent material I had lying around was transparency film.
I got going on the footwork of building my case, the most obvious part of which is to make it fit! I looked up the dimensions online, and whaddya know, I found them on the website of the Raspberry Pi itself. "The Raspberry Pi measures 85.60mm x 53.98mm x 17mm, with a little overlap for the SD card and connectors which project over the edges." is explicitly stated on the FAQs page. But just to make sure, I got out my ruler. I have no idea where those dimensions came from, but they don't belong to my Raspberry Pi Model B. Maybe they're for the not-yet-produced Model A? Anyway, I measured to the best of my ability. For small schematics and technical layouts like this, I usually just use Inkscape, my favorite vector graphics editor. I'm very familiar with it, and it's usually sufficient for tasks like this (plus, I don't have to leave Linux and boot into Windows to use Solidworks :D).
Judging lengths by eye with my meager plastic ruler turned out (predictably) not to be very accurate. Too bad I don't have callipers lying around. Needless to say, I had trouble jamming the Raspi into the first case, and the second revision was still troublesome. Finally, I got something that fit perfectly, and went on to slap some fancy connector labels on there.
I've made the final product freely available, and open source. You can download the US Letter version, or the A4 version.
The project page is here. Have fun building your cases, or customizing your own. I'd love to see what anyone does with this!
 |
| All of it's beautiful insides visible. |
