cases | Raspberry Pi

MAKE and MCM Raspberry Pi Design Competition: the winners!

MAKE held a Raspberry Pi Design competition with MCM Electronics for US-based Pi owners, and have just released the results. I’m not sure what’s more impressive: the outstanding quality of the entries, or the fact that even though we spend much of the day furiously googling for new Pi projects, many of the submissions were new to us here at the Foundation. It’s great for us to watch other organisations running contests like this: not least because it’s a real relief not to have to judge them ourselves!

The Grand Prize went to Intonarumori, a collection of magic sound boxes made by a hacker/art collective called urbanSTEW. The STEW-folk say:

Intonarumori is a series of interactive sound boxes created by an art/tech collective, urbanSTEW. The project is based on a century-old futurist movement in which noise-generating machines were created. Inspired by this, urbanSTEW built six new noise machines, each equipped with a Raspberry Pi and various sensors/controls. The boxes are self contained and only need to be plugged in. Intonarumori was presented at a creativity festival where they were played by over 2,000 children/adults.

The Sunlight Foundation’s Lobbyist Meter won the Artistic category: we tweeted about this a while back (and it’s been in my “things to blog” folder for a while) because we thought it was a clever, snarky, funny way to bring attention to a very serious issue. You can read more about the Lobbyist Meter on the Sunlight Foundation’s website. Here it is, doing its transparent, democratic thing.

The Education category award went to a project you’ll all have seen before, if you’re regular readers: Emma Bennett’s beautiful school State Board project (which we have been using in talks as a demonstration of some of the very cool stuff we see kids doing with the Pi) won the prize. Read more about it in the post we wrote when we first saw Emma’s work, and see some video of the board in action below.

Everybody in our offices secretly wants a wooden case for their Pi, because we are all impractical, and we have all read Idoru. The Enclosures category was won by Chris Crumpacker for this beautiful piece of hand-tooled walnut. Chris, if you’re reading, please get in touch. We absolutely, positively need one of these to hold one of the Pis at Raspberry Towers.

Chris told MAKE:

Some times all you need is a bit of scrap wood for inspiration. I had some walnut left over from a previous project. I just love the look of walnut. I had seen other wood cases but they where always 6 pieces of wood glued or nailed together to make a box. I wanted it to be one hunk of wood and my intentions were to carve out a home for the Raspberry Pi.

The final category, Utility, was won by another project we’ve featured here: David Bryan’s cat feeder, which I enjoyed blogging about because it gave me the opportunity to use the phrase “liver-flavoured kibbles”.

Congratulations to all the winners, and thanks to MAKE and MCM for running the competition. You can see the other entries on MAKE’s website – enjoy!

Raspberry Pi rev2 template with mounting holes

Thank you to Adafruit for bringing my attention to this!

Raspberry Pi Spy has created a handy little template of the v2 Raspberry Pi, complete with mounting holes and the location of ports and other components, for you to use in your projects. Case designers and people wanting to mount the Pi securely for robotics and other projects that move around a lot will find this particularly helpful.

For print, ensure that the image is sized as a 85x56mm rectangle. Click to enlarge.

Visit the most excellent Raspberry Pi Spy for printable PDFs of this template (where the image is pre-sized for you) and discussion of what size screws you’ll need for those holes, along with much more Raspberry Pi goodness. A word of warning: Pete Lomas always asks me not to refer to the holes, which are there to aid the robots in the production process, as mounting holes. (Don’t look at the title, Pete.) This is because enthusiastic screwdriver wranglers can compress and fatally crush the PCB by tightening screws too firmly. If you screw your board to something, you’re doing so at your own risk!

Thursday grab bag

Heatermeter

Want to control the temperature of your barbecue, smoker, firepit or clambake over a web interface? Here’s the Raspberry Pi-powered HeaterMeter. Bryan Mayland says:

HeaterMeter for RaspberryPi joins an Arduino / AVR ATmega328 microcontroller with OpenWrt running on a RaspberryPi $35 wonder-computer for the purpose of providing oven-like control of a charcoal BBQ grill via web interface. The microcontroller controls a fan which limits airflow to the pit, displays the current status on a character LCD, and passes the data on to the RaspberyPi which streams real-time updates to connected web browsers. The website also works on mobile browsers running Android or iOS, allowing users to unchain themselves from their grills and partake in many life-enriching activities such as

Going to the grocery store to buy more beer

Going to a bar to drink more beer

Not get off the couch, where your beer is

Possibly other non-beer related hobbies

Monogame

Dean Ellis has got Monogame running on his Pi. There are details of exactly what hacks he’s used to get it running so well on the YouTube page that this video comes from.

Monogame is an open source implementation of the Microsoft XNA 4 Framework – and it gives us all kinds of ideas about game development on the Pi. You can read some more about Dean and his Pi here.

Make Yourself at Home

We’ve been seeing a lot of visual artists using the Raspberry Pi in their installations. Whether you’re driving video or if you want to drive something with wheels, the Pi offers artists a much cheaper way of getting to their goals than the old “borrow someone’s old laptop” model. We’ve seen Pis being used in the Tate Gallery’s new Tanks in London; we’ve seen them being used in installations at Milton Keynes shopping centre. Most recently, I’ve heard from Martin Beha, who was working on the electronics side of an installation by Austrian artist Robert F Hammerstiel in Hannover. He used Raspberry Pis to make three lawnmower robots talk to each other. (You can see them from about two minutes into this video.) The result is curiously charming.

Click for more on the installation

Martin says:

The communication is established through Wireless LAN. One of the Robots is configured as a server and delivers a (completely wrong but usable) time via NTP for synchronisation. It also calculates the start time for the audio files and delivers it to the other robots via SSH and “at”. The audio is taken directly from the analog output and is amplified by an 18W amplifier module. The sound quality is quite satisfactory for speech.

The devices are powered by a second battery because the manufacturer of the lawn mower robot has built in a function that monitors if additional current is taken from the main battery and stops the robot. The 5V is generated by DC/DC-Converters for car use. Other included circuits are for example a differential amplifier against an audio ground loop and a deep discharge protector.

I chose the Raspberry Pi for reasons of flexibility, size and because there was a very limited budget. The original plan was to communicate via Bluetooth Class 1 dongles and rfcomm to get a virtual serial connection. Because of several bugs in Bluetooth I could not connect the devices and decided to choose Wi-Fi as an alternative. Depending on different (resistor) jumper settings on the GPIO-Port, the RPIs recognize their conversation role after startup and play the right file. The jumper also defines the role as server or client. So I was able to use the same SD-Card image for all robots.

The actual audio files are mp3s of a dialogue about the sense of a robot’s life, spoken by three TV announcers of Austrian national television (Austrians will surely recognize their voices).

STEM – training the teachers

There was a big Raspberry Pi event in Manchester last week, where a large group (including our very own Pete Lomas, accurately described by gocracker.com as “charismatic“) came together for a CPD/networking event for teachers at the Museum of Science and Industry.

Krisma? Bags of it.

We’re not alone in recognising that there’s a lot to be done before a new Computing syllabus arrives at schools next year in helping teachers out of the old ICT mindset and showing them how easy starting with the Pi can be. We’re really pleased to see how seriously teachers are taking the Raspberry Pi, and, as always, incredibly grateful to STEMNET for their tireless volunteering. This was the first of a series of events, where teachers were learning how to use the Pi with Manchester University’s Pi Face, getting to grips with Scratch and Python, and working on cross-curricular activities with the Raspberry Pi. A number of STEM ambassadors from industry also attended, doing that support and mentorship thing that STEMNET does so well. (I don’t think I’ve been to a single Raspberry Pi event that hasn’t been attended by at least one STEM ambassador.) We’d like to thank every one of them, and all of the teachers who are working so hard on getting to grips with a new piece of kit – we’re very grateful.

Jude’s cardboard case

Pete Wood from DesignSpark put me onto this most excellent little series of tutorial videos from Jude Pullen. Jude is a fan of cardboard. Having watched this, so am I!

A guest post from Pimoroni

Liz: I asked Paul and Jon at Pimoroni, the company they set up to make the rainbow-tacular Pibow Raspberry Pi case, to let us know how things are proceeding up in Sheffield. As well as creating 30 jobs manufacturing the Raspberry Pi in Wales, we’re really proud that the success of the Raspberry Pi has meant that other companies are appearing in the Raspberry Pi ecosystem, producing still more jobs making things like cases and other add-ons.

Paul has gone from being That Guy Who Won the Raspberry Pi Logo Contest to owning a small manufacturing business in Sheffield, a part of the UK with a manufacturing heritage in sore need of reviving, and becoming an employer. Pimoroni’s only one of many Raspberry Pi success stories: if you’ve got a similar tale to tell, we’d love to hear from you.

We’ve met some incredible people through Raspberry Pi. We’re as proud as anything to be able to call Paul a (really great) friend – and we’re really looking forward to meeting Jon on our next trip to the Land of Wind and Ghosts (and The Full Monty). Over to Paul and Jon!

The current state of play at Pibow Towers. Click to enlarge.

We said we’d keep everyone updated on how we’re making Pibows, and what the process has been like.

It’s been pretty much 10 weeks since we started taking pre-orders, and 8 weeks since we cut the first Pibow.

Stacking and packing

The prototype work on the Pibow was done with the help of the Refab Lab at Access Space in Sheffield. This helped us get from an idea on the computer to reality. It’s also validated the rate of production, so we knew that laser cutting would allow us to make a decent number of units per day if things got busy.

We cannot stress enough how essential having a community-run laser cutter available was to making the Pibow happen. The world needs more community Maker/Hackspaces to help people use their skills to Make, Reuse and Repair stuff. Support your local Hackspace.

Cut acrylic ready for recycling

The interest from Pi owners after the post on the front page of Raspberry Pi meant our ‘crazy’ figure of maybe 1000 orders looked a bit laughable. New pants were needed at this point and a new plan.

For a start, we needed a bigger laser cutter than planned and a proper workshop to put it in. HPC Laser were amazing at holding our hands through sizing up and installing a rather large laser cutter and a supply of acrylic for the layers, and this way we didn’t have to deal with the uncertainty of importing and setting up a laser cutter with scant knowledge.

A frickin’ laser!

As far as workshop space goes, although Sheffield is renowned for steel, The Full Monty and Pulp, we have a long history of small, ingenious workshops (Little Mesters) around the area I live, which made finding space pretty easy, a sad sign of the current economy, but useful for starting up an agile manufacturing company.

Bert and Ernie, the Pibow laser cutters

Laser cutters are amazing tools. They’re relatively safe, light on maintenance and scale fairly well from prototype to production in a way that 3D printers don’t. Fire is the main risk and easily managed with care and attention. Hackspace Rule #0: Don’t be on fire.

We’re also proud that not only is all the furniture in our workshop either second-hand, salvaged, scavenged or self-produced, but we also recycle the bits left over from making Pibows into more acrylic. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.

The workshop. Note third laser (printer).

It’s amazing how much the details take time with this sort of thing. We had to quickly learn how to cut the pieces reliably and consistently, check quality, organise into completed Pibows and then design and make packaging and ship them to over 60 countries. There are so many details to get wrong in all of this, but we got a decent solution to make sure packages would make it through customs easily in most places around the world.

Retail packaging

We also found that scaling up supply of things is hard. We managed to run suppliers out of just about everything. Nuts and Bolts, Labels, packaging, bubble wrap, acrylic, everything! Buying 1000 of something is harder than buying 10, and we didn’t have the luxury of waiting weeks for new stock. You guys needed Pibows NOW and we were well aware of our obligations.

A ton of acrylic

We managed to ship our first orders 3 weeks from launch. We’ve peaked at around 6-8 weeks (boooo) and we’re now rapidly catching up, as we’ve added another machine (They’re called Bert and Ernie), hired our first full-time employee (Rory) and got a lot better at everything we do.

Weighing Pibows for shipping

Still. It’s only been 2 months of production and we’ve improved and grown massively in that time. Watch out for more from us in the future – Pibow is just the start!

We want to thank everyone who bought a Pibow for their support and patience. You’ve all been super-nice, and we’ve enjoyed chatting to you, helping you, and reading all the excited tweets. Pat yourself on the back for helping create a new community-and-maker driven light manufacturing company in one of the poorest, but most awesome, cities in the UK.

A reward after a hard day’s cutting, stacking, packing, tweeting, emailing and dispatching.

We also want to thank Oomlout, Adafruit, Maplin, HPC Laser, Perspex UK, Dust and especially our friends and families for helping us go from zero to over 7000 Pibows shipped in 10 weeks, from nowt but an idea.

And most of all, we’d like to thank Eben and Liz and the Raspberry Pi Foundation for making this possible.

- Paul and Jon

Pibow

If you’ve listened to interviews we’ve given about the general fantasticness of our community, you’ll have heard us mention more than once that that very fantasticness has, on occasion, made us alter the direction the Foundation has planned to take things in. (Raspbian, a Raspberry Pi optimised distro which came out of the community, and which you should already have upgraded to because it’s 40% faster that Squeeze, is a great case in point.)

What's that, you ask? Keep reading for an explanation.

One of the most surprising about-turns for us came over casing. We had solid plans on getting an official case designed, once we’d sold enough Raspberry Pis that we could afford the injection moulding for large numbers, and selling that alongside the Raspberry Pi. But a cases ecosystem appeared almost instantly once the Raspberry Pi was in the community’s hands, and people started to get very excited about making their own, either for home use, or to sell. And we like that, because we believe the world runs on entrepreneurship, and hope that from small case-companies great things will grow. We also like the fact that the Raspberry Pi acts as inspiration to kids to go and make their own; physical making as well as digital hacking is something we really want to encourage. (The educational release will come in a very bare-bones case, but we hope that one project that schools will take on as soon as they get them will be getting kids to make their own cases, either using that bare case as a base for their design, or making new ones from scratch.)

Pibow set up

So we’re not giving any one case official Raspberry Pi Foundation status. But if you’re still looking for one and don’t own a lathe and a laser cutter, the closest you’re going to come to such a thing is the Pibow from Paul Beech, who designed our logo, does our letterheads and business cards, and is currently working on the Foundation’s new web site design. (Paul posts as @guru here and on our forums.) Lots and lots of you send Eben and me your cases in the mail (soon we will need a larger house to keep them all in), and I should make it clear that I’m not featuring Paul’s here because he works with the Foundation, but because his case is one of the most solid – absolutely no rattling – and best-looking cases I’ve seen yet. (He’s donating a proportion of the profits to the Raspberry Pi Foundation, the GIST Foundation and his local Access Space, which we’re very grateful for.)

There's even a clever slot for GPIO ribbon cable if you're doing a spot of physical computing with your Pi.

Paul introduced me to a prototype Pibow at Games Britannia a few weeks ago. About eight seconds after he removed it from his bag, a small girl barrelled up to us and said: “Is that a Raspberry Pi case? It’s LOVELY. Where can I get one?” He then showed us a newer prototype in the pub after the Cambridge Raspberry Jam last weekend, and a cluster of grown men holding pints said: “It’s FANTASTIC. Where can I get one?”, so I reckon he’s got most bases covered.

I agree with the little girl. It’s lovely. You can get one from the Pibow website, I think it’s the nicest retail case I’ve seen, and I want one. Hint hint, Paul.

Ben Heck’s Raspberry Pi case (which looks suspiciously like a BBC Micro…)

We met Ben, King of the Modders, at Maker Faire back in May. He’s a stand-up chap, and took a Raspberry Pi home with him. Here’s what he did with it.

It flips up like a writing desk so you can keep things inside it, it's got a slot for "cartridges" (which you can also hack together at home) - I wish my Beeb had come with all these bells and whistles.

Here’s the episode of element14′s Ben Heck show which shows you what to do. Files for the case itself are available too; you’ll need to use a laser cutter, which is a great excuse to join a local Make Space, Hackspace or another hackers collective (there’s a large and growing list of where you can find such things at hackerspaces.org). element14 are also running a competition which closes August 18, where you can win the case featured in these pics and video. Thanks Ben – we love it. I hope we can get together again soon!

Biz’s LEGO case: buy parts!

The Daily Brick have released their first custom LEGO kit: it’s all the bricks you need to make Biz’s Raspberry Pi case (£9.95). You might remember Biz; she’s an 12-year-old Scout, a roboticist and a fan of Raspberry Pi. Her case was really popular here – I know a lot of you have made one already from LEGO you had at home – and was written about online in places like MakeZine and The Register. (We’re impressed; we had to work for six years before The Register paid any attention to us.)

Click to visit The Daily Brick.

I’ve spoken to Biz’s Dad, who says that Biz has chosen to be remunerated by The Daily Brick in LEGO. So if you want to see Biz’s collection grow, and don’t have the pieces you need to make the case at home already, please head over and order. Well done Biz, and thanks, Daily Brick guys!

Biz’s LEGO case – the Boreatton Scouts hit Germany.

Biz, age 12, is a member of the Boreatton Scouts Robo Club. When we featured them in a post a few weeks ago, we had a number of requests for instructions on making the LEGO Raspberry Pi case she’d created. She’s sent me some instructions and photos – thanks Biz!

The Scouts are in Mannheim, Germany today. They’re representing the UK in the FIRST LEGO League Open Robot Championship; judging is taking place today. We thought you’d like to see the extremely swanky uniforms they’re using for the contest, and Cazz, another Scout, agreed to model them here. (Note left arm.)

Over to Biz for case instructions. Thanks again, Biz; and good luck to all of you in Germany!

First make a two layer base – we had to use blue and red because that’s what we had – it is 13 splots by 9 (awkward!)

Now we add some flat bits to hold the Pi so the solder bits don’t get scraped when we plug things in and out.

You can load the RasPi in now or wait until the end!

Now build the walls – one layer at a time! Again we just used what bits we had.

Going up!

Oops! A bit fuzzy!

Tah dah!

Now we need a lid – again the lego sizes are a bit inconvenient and so we have a notch in the bottom edge and a corresponding hole that we were short of bits to fill.

Actually that turned out to be quite handy as we have an easy detachable half lid that gives access to pinouts and test points.

Now for the cute bit...

Here are the bits...

Had to make it double thickness and again ran out of a splot - but that doesn't show!

And finally a round mini-splot to attach to the case (and hide the hole in the roof).

Cute!

And that's Biz's RasPi case!

The Punnet – a card case for you to print (for free)

E, who surely has the least Googlable name of all our forum members, has made a really excellent little card case for the Raspberry Pi. (Please let me know what your real name is, E, if you’d like me to credit you properly!) It’s something you can print at home; if your printer won’t take card that’s heavy enough, just print it on paper and trace it onto the card.

The Punnet. Click for a PDF to print, cut out and fold.

E says in his associated forum post that this is an alpha version of the Punnet; he’s not been able to test it with a Raspberry Pi because he’s one of the poor souls who’s still waiting for his, and people have reported that a couple of the ports are a little off. You can download a final version, with ports in the right place, from SquareItRound – there is also a zipped SVG version you can edit yourselves for modding purposes. Have a go and let us know how you get on!