Raspberry Pi Business Card Box
After months of waiting, my Raspberry Pi finally arrived on Friday[1]. Somehow I resisted the temptation to dash straight home and start playing with it, and went along to my daughter’s summer concert at school. This one has been earmarked to replace our decrepit Kiss Dp-600 streaming media player – more on that later. First though it needed a box. Since the form factor is the size of a credit card, and credit cards are the same size as business cards, I reckoned one of the plastic boxes that business cards come with might work. It does:
I could have done a better job with the RCA hole – it’s a bit too high. Hopefully somebody will come up with a nice paper template to do this properly (and I expect a laser cutter could do a much better job than me with a steak knife and a tapered reamer).
I’ve not done anything with the box lid yet, but it’s probably a good idea to keep dust out. I’m guessing that at a max power draw of 3.5W that heat dissipation shouldn’t be too much of a worry.
[1] My order number was 2864, so it looks like I just missed the earlier first batch of 2000. If there’s a next time I need to remember to fill out the interest form first before tweeting about it :(
Filed under: Raspberry Pi | 5 Comments
Tags: box, business card, Raspberry Pi, Raspi
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I am patiently waiting for the delivery of my raspi. My brother suggested to me to use a business card box to house my raspi. You beat me to it. Thanks for the photo, mate.
I have not seen my Pi drawing more than 3.3w and this generates very little heat. However, I have noticed the board getting warm (30ish degrees C) when on for the whole day (in a room around 18 degrees C). I don’t think it would heat up any more than that but bear in mind that is with free ventilation. When enclosed it would probably get a bit warmer, especially since plastic is an insulator so keep an eye on it. :-)
Maybe I should put my Nanode based temperature sensor in the box to get some data. Meanwhile I’ll be crossing my fingers that my clumsy cutting work provides room for convection (in the sure knowledge that many other streaming media players are encased in plastic).
I’m sure it will be fine, at worst a small air hole or two will fix it. I’m planning on doing something similar with a plastic hobby case from Maplin. It’s just annoying how the I/O ports are positioned all over the board.
Somebody has come up with a really cool template for a cardboard box for the Raspberry Pi, which they’re calling the punnet. Whilst this is great in its own right I think a punnet design on paper would probably make a decent template for cutting a business card box.