Wednesday 23 July 2014

A 3D printed Raspberry Pi VESA mount

The Barcelona Activa folks at the Parc Tecnològic Barcelona Nord has opened a 3D printing space, available for the lucky people working in its facilities, featuring the amazingly cheap and cool BCN3D+ printer and the well-known MakerBot.

After a quick lessonand browsing through Thingiverse, I quickly found that the Raspberry Pi was a hot item with plenty of designs available to further enhance the Rpi experience,so I took this thing (a VESA-mount enclosure for the Raspberry Pi) and did a quick test ride.

There are plenty of tutorials and available free available software on 3D printing, so I'm going to skip this and leave a 3D printing walkthrough for a future post.

I ran the .STL file over the GCode Analyzer to see how my case was to be printedand how much time will it take to print (about 2 hours, just the case without the top-lid), and then copy the GCODE into a SD card, put it in the BCN3D+, calibrate (grumble, grumble), and the result is shown below.







The Raspberry Pi fits quite nice in the enclosure, I only had to remove a loose thread or two to connect the HDMI connector, I have not printed the top-cover as I intend to connect many things to the device, so I'm not sure yet what space should I leave for the cabling and maybe use the cover as a base mount for a sensor, etc.

I'm planning on sticking the Rpi behind my monitor and avoid seeing all the cables on top of my desk, also it serves OK to hang on a wall... good thing is that the Raspberry fits in the enclosure, but with little effort it can be pulled off, allowing a quick swap.

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