A better RaspberryPi case
No idea why I thought that this was a good idea, but none of the raspberry pi cases with screw mounts (mostly vesa mounts, for obvious reasons) work for me. Most of them are made for imperial screws and sorry, that's not gonna happen. Also, most of them make you screw in the Pi into the case which is completely unnecessary if the case design is correct.
So today I did a first test by taking the official mechanical drawings and creating a sketch in Fusion 360 (Side note, I really want to learn FreeCAD, but every time I try it I get stopped by something that is just super easy in Fusion...) for the bottom half of my case (in fact, for now, just the base plate with the mounting points) to see if my assumptions on the drawings are correct.
A couple of points to note after printing it and testing it with my OctoPi:
- It needs more clearance for the soldering on the bottom. I started with 2mm it definitely could do with 3 or 4.
- I put a bunch of round holes into the bottom as vents and that was a bad idea as a bunch of round holes just massively increase the print time so I'll convert these to long holes, probably by using the grid I created with the holes.
- The external screw mounts need more beef around the screw hole.
- The SD card slot needs a notch in the ground plate
Here's what this first test actually looks like after printing:
