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RE: [3D Design] SteemPi Full Case Redesign
This is definitely a case i would purchase for my pi. I really like how you clearly stated the words "heavily vented". Its well known the cases can cause overheating, i often leave the top off of mine regularly. You mentioned this was made is fusion 360 and that you have used blender as well, but i was curious if you have used a program like Solidworks? or maybe you have heard of it?
One of the things that really bothers me about some of the popular Raspberry Pi cases is that they seem to be completely unaware that the Pi is passively cooled. No real cooling can happen without air being able to come across the board and up over the CPU and memory, taking the heat with it.
Even with this case I'm not entirely thrilled with the amount of venting that's available. The bottom is pretty well slotted, but at the edges of the board, there is very little to no room for error to make its way up from beneath (and if it's sitting flat on a table, you're probably not going to have a lot of available air coming through that venting anyway.
Aside from around the plugs (which is decent but not great) the only other major venting for the top of the board that I have here is the SteemPi logo at the end, where the LED would be exposed but which has a fair amount of space around that. All of the air that would be rising off of the CPU and memory would have to be coming in through that opening as well.
It's not my favorite, it's what I'm saying.
I'm really thinking about whether or not it would be reasonable to change the basic design from one intended to lay flat on a table to one intended to stand on end. The bad part of that would be that cables come out of it either end of the Raspberry Pi, and in fact there's really no narrow side which you can approach easily that doesn't have some sort of plug going into or out of it.
Really, I need to think about passive cooling in regards to case design for single board computers a little more before I come to some sort of conclusion on that topic.
I have heard of SolidWorks, but the seat licenses are ridiculously stupidly priced for someone who is effectively self-taught and a maker without the backing of a corporate department without the ancillary financial support. Luckily, some of the guys that put together SolidWorks went on to establish a new company and online CAD system called Onshape which is free to use within certain limits and runs on everything from a toaster to your high-end video production PC. I often trade-off between F360 and Onshape depending on my mood and what set of tools I want to work with at the time.
Ironically, I've only really been at 3D modeling for a little over a year. For some reason people keep thinking I've been doing this for most of my life.
i agree with the design flaws of the raspberry pi and wish somewhere down the line they would incorporate a small brushless fan but that would draw more power so they would have to trade it off somewhere else. Either way your design for a steemit case was on point.
I had no idea of Onshape and had only used a 30 day trial of solidworks but found it to be pretty amazing in its capabilities. thank you for sharing that information i will be looking into that program. i say keep up the good work!
There are designs with add-on fans and even bigger passive heatsinks. It's not hard to design in amount for an extra 40 mm fan, and that's more than enough cooling for most applications. If you're already driving things off of a USB connector, you should have plenty of power left over to run such a thing. It is a little bit noisier, however.
I think you'll enjoy Onshape. I've done a couple of things on Steemit with the program but I'm starting to think at least a from scratch walk-through or video would go over well. What you think?
If your willing to take the time for a walkthrough I would be interested. I like watching how to’s on 3D rendering and design, and as it’s open source...it helps everyone.
I'll give it some thought. Sometimes you just have to wait for inspiration to strike, hard, against the head with a serrated surface.