If you’ve got a personal website that needs hosting or a few hundred gigabytes of files that could use a centralized storage location, the Raspberry Pi’s small size and extreme energy efficiency make it a compelling server choice compared to that curbside Pentium 4 box you’ve been trying to find a home for. All you need is something to put in.
Of course there’s no shortage of Pi case designs ready to be extruded from your 3D printer, but we recently found ourselves particularly taken with this unique one designed by [Ken Segler]. It’s not only small and sleek with a dash of futuristic flair, but it includes a front-mounted two inch 240 x 320 IPS display that connects to the Pi over SPI. At the minimum that gives you a way to see all those beautiful boot messages on startup, but with a little code, it could provide you with various system statics and status messages at a glance.
While the LCD is clearly the star of the show here, the case also has a few other nice features that make it worthy of your consideration. The magnetically attached fan filter on the the top, for one. The stacked layout that puts the Pi directly above the SSD also makes for a relatively compact final product.
One thing to note though is that [Ken] is using Power-over-Ethernet, meaning there’s no spot for a dedicated power jack on the case. It’s an easy enough feature to add into your own build, but naturally not everyone’s network is suitably equipped. In that case, beyond the normal annoyances of editing STL files, it shouldn’t be too much trouble to add one in without having to literally hack your way through the printed plastic.
Maybe it could be more readable if we put a Fresnel magnifier in front.
Terry Gilliam and Central Services approve this idea.
Buttle ot Tuttle?
I’m afraid you’ll have to ask Information Retrieval. This is Information Adjustments…
Jupiter Rising?
nice, but terminal too smal for me.
I need big rotor for sound volume control
and meybe some switches in front or top/front .
Make it happen! Be sure to tip HaD when it’s done!
Brazil!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)
Looks like the Hackaday Ministry of Information has memory-holed our comments about Fresnel lens and the MOI. :-(
All computers need a tiny built-in screen. And maybe the ability to make phone calls …
more pics here -> https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/hrp8sl/i_designed_and_printed_this_case_for_my_nas/
I can’t get my pi to run more than 48 hours without locking up. What’s the trick to making them reliable for an application like this?
I have several Pi that are on weeks of uptime at the moment. One is a weather station and the other is my Pi 4 daily desktop.
Use a better power supply and SD card.
My Pi Zero W has an uptime of 130 days. Last reboot was due to a power outage. Perhaps its the PSU/SD card that’s unstable.
Yea, I looked at the PSU, and it is severely under current and voltage. Unfortunately, it has caused some heat damage to the Pi itself. I’ve moved everything to a spare Pi and fresh power supply and things look much happier now.
I typically get years of uptime. They do tend to eat SD Cards though… And that’s what takes’em down. A quick re-image and they are back up (I keep an up to date enough sd card image backup for each of them). The new sata setup should fix my only reliability problem with them. I would suggest checking your power supply as these things should be Rock solid as long as you have a good power supply.
One thing that can really kill the SD is constant small writes such as log files. I implemented an earlier Hackaday fix and haven’t lost another card since. https://hackaday.com/2019/04/08/give-your-raspberry-pi-sd-card-a-break-log-to-ram/
You can buy a USB3 to M.2 connector adaptor and plug in an SSD.
I am missing in this design a massive kill switch. Just joking. I like more the minimal cubic design of the Nano Pi. Imaging pointing to a tiny cube and saying “that is the server hosting of my webpage”. I would buy a Nano Pi if it wasn’t made in China.