Berry Box - The Transparent Case

Ferret141 said:

But is there enough clearance under the Pi baord to accomodate the nut and screw protusion. Or is the screw head meant to be under the board.

Yes, the screw head is ment to be under the board.

So far  meccano compatibility is not part of our design, but we will have a look in to this.

Everybody that is interested in some more background information about the development of the Berry Box™, its creators, and some more technical background please visit our new blog: http://engbiz.wordpress.com.

It looks really nice and teasty for me.

Have you got any updates regarding to the releasing date and pricings yet as RasPi has passed its CE test, I will need a case to take the first bite

Thanks Regardd RW

Hey mrcola,

Thanks for your interest. We had hoped to have a crowd funding page up last weekend, but unfortunately easter bank holiday in the uk has meant our page is stuck in approval. Hopefully we can give you a link in the coming days.

Bruce

Hey Everyone,

First the big news. I am pleased to say that our crowd funding page is now live and we are taking preorders through Wefund! You can get there by clicking here. Please support us in making the Berry Box possible.

In other news, we have made a couple of revisions to the Berry Box design. I threw together a couple of renders:

Hi Bruce,

It's looking good and It'll be very handy to have. When I first started Uni we built robots with Lego, shame I got rid of all of mine.  As a design study/engineering project its a pretty cool example as well.

Its a tricky thing making a box not look like a box,  its hard to get a feel for things from pictures.

Does it have surface texture or its smooth?

Is it just going to be clear or red tinted?

Nice one guys, hope you get the funding

You don"t hang about do you – good luck with the funding and congratulations on an attractive and practical solution!

I"ve been thinking about RPi / robotics and its impossible without an interface of somekind, be it the "gertboard" , custom made circuitry on a breadboard or another 3rd party solution.

Would you also consider making a compatible modular case for your prefered interface board?

bruceberry said:

Hey Everyone,

Can those lego mounting holes be used for stacking more than one BerryBox together? How do I order more than one BerryBox and how much is shipping in that case?

I really like the Lego compatibility.  I posted a message to the Lugnet Robotics forum.  Hopefully the news will spread.

HansH said:

Nice one guys, hope you get the funding

Thanks for your support. If you like help us to spread the word...

@tumblebomb

I also cut my robotic teeth with lego! It really is a wonderful invention.

The final production unit will be done with transparent plastic and have a smooth finish. If you have a transparent plastic ruler to hand the finish will be similar to that.

We are considering colours, but not at launch.

@pygmy_giant

We have a draft (a messy sketch in my notebook) for a breadboard that is compatible with the Berry Box, however we need to take this one step at a time.

We also intend to produce a case which incorporates an expansion board, but this is even further off. I believe the gertboard can be connected via a ribbon cable so we might make a case just for the gertboard if this idea proves popular. Again, one step at a time.

@vesku

The case can be "stacked" back to back, but that would only give you a stack of two. It would however be possible to build a larger structure out of lego to mount all of your Berry Box's too

We were really anticipating much demand for multiple cases, how many do you need?

@HansH & Jeff2 & everyone else

Thanks guys! We need all the help we can get and your positive comments are really encouraging.

Everybody who would like a 5 £ transparent case, please support us!

Our crowdfunding is at 5% of the sum we need to get the production started, so still a long way to go…

Please pre-order now if you want a transparent lego fit case to protect your Raspberry PI:

http://www.wefund.com/project/berry-box

A BIG THANK YOU to everybody who supported us so far and made the 5% possible!

If this isn't exactly for you, maybe your friends would like one so please help us to spread the word.

If you are interested in some background information, check out our blog:

http://engbiz.wordpress.com/

If its only about 10 € that are missing in the end I will commit myself to a second one, but hopefully more people will back this up

Greetings All,  Seems my postsdisappeared into the mist around the cloud.  I'll try again.  The following are some observations onstacking box’s and adding proto boards:

1. 
   Stacking – Stacking boxes on top
   of each other will cause the heat to rise due to the chimney effect.
   Heat should  enter and escape from the box through the sides to
   minimize this effect.
   
   Note:  It was reported (in the Forum)
   that a closed RPi box got rather warm after 3-4 hours of operation.
   
   


2. 
   Adding a baby board – A baby
   board (or proto board) can be easily attached to the I/O pins below
   the RPi board .  The RPi will be shipped without a connector
   soldered in the I/O pins.  So we can solder a header to the
   underside of the board.  A baby board with a matching receptacle
   soldered to its top then mates with the header on the RPi board.
   This requires a Berry box that is about 5/8 to 3/4” taller and a
   way to securely mount both boards.  There is about 1/2” separation
   between the boards.
   
   


3. 
   To design a mating board the
   location of hole #1 of the I/O pins with respect to the RPi outside
   dimensions is needed.  Perhaps the Foundation and post this when
   time permits.
   
   

Your Berry Box is very nice.  Good work.

[rurwin]

rrmcbeth said:

  The RPi will be shipped without a connector soldered in the I/O pins.

Incorrect. At least the first batch, and very probably every subsequent batch, will have male pins on top of the board. Take a look at the pictures of production boards that are surfacing in ever greater numbers. They have a yellow video socket, connectors on the DSI and CSI, and headers on both GPIO and JTAG.

Well, somewhere I read that it would be shipped without the header to keep costs down.  I guess we need a clarification from the Foundation.

Stacking:

1)  I/O cables need to extend through the side of the box so they do not interfere with the box stacked on top.

2)  A stacked array of RPi's may be interconnected via the I/O connector in a daisy chain configuration. Therefore, the I/O cable opening needs to big enough to pass 2 flat cables and perhaps the connector itself.

I have made a transparent case at the base is adapted to insert pieces of LEGO and also works for ventilation.

Cheers Pirx, We will be doing the same

Thanks for the info rrmcbeth/rurwin. The GPIO cutout design isn't final, changes will be made once we've seen the boards that are shipping. At the very least you will be able to get a ribbon cable through.

What do you guys want to do with your stacked R-pi's?

It's possible that someone may want to build a "Super Computer" using multiple RPi's.   I believe that some post grad students built one using 64 PC's.  Just think how low cost, low power and small physical size it would be.

One of the first digital computers (the ENIAC) was built in the 40's. It had 17,468 vacuum tubes, 1500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 5,000,000 solder connections and consumed 150,000 watts.  64 RPi's would consume less than 100 watts.  Look how far we have come and what the future holds.

Yes I'm familiar with this, we have a cluster here at Swansea Uni, they are very cost effective. Though typically a cluster consists of more standard computing hardware, something like a core i7 with a healthy amount of ram.

I keep reading the new metric of comparison in HPC is GFLOPs/watt though... Any idea's on how the R-Pi compares in terms of GFLOPs/watt to a typical cluster node?

I have no idea.  A GFLOP is 1,000,000,000 floating point operation/sec.  A MFLOP = 1,000,000 per seconds. The RPi has embedded math hardware.  So lets make some assumptions:

1)   Clock = 700 mHz

2)   1 Instruction cycle = 2 clock cycles.

3)   A Flop instruction  = 2 instruction cycles

4)   So you get 175,000,000 flops/sec or 175MFLOPS = .175 GFLOPs

5)   The RPi consumes about 1.5 watts.

6)   Therefore, we get 116 MFLOPS/watt/second

I see them going to 100 GFLOP these days. (Power for that speed is needed to calculate GFLOP/Watt)  But 116 MFLOP/W is not bad for a $35 board.

Interesting, when the availability is better I'm tempted to buy 10 and do some benchmarking...

bruceberry said:

@vesku
The case can be "stacked" back to back, but that would only give you a stack of two. It would however be possible to build a larger structure out of lego to mount all of your Berry Box's too

We were really anticipating much demand for multiple cases, how many do you need?

I need maybe five boxes. Can I just pay 5x5£ through WeFund and pay shipping separately when you are ready to send boxes?