Howdy folks! I've recently picked up a few Raspberry Pi 3s and have slowly started working on small projects with them. My current one is mainly focused around cooling as I'm trying to OC as high, and as safely, as possible. I'm currently employing my primary board as a RetroPie station. I started with
this case from Amazon, but quickly realized I could do better with a larger fan. So, I dropped by Fry's Electronics and grabbed
this 70x70x10mm fan. Enter the problem of the case I had not working with the fan. So, I was dealing with essentially sitting the fan right on top of the board. The problem was that this wasn't ideal for getting the air flowing properly around the heatsink on the SoC. So I set out to build my own. I did a mock-up using whatever I could find from random LEGOs laying around the house. I've since moved, and improved the model, in LEGO Digital Designer. I'm powering the fan with a USB adapter plugged into an externally powered USB hub at home, and flip the USB plug to the Pi when on the go, hence the wires exiting the case. My mock-up design does a nice job of tunneling the airflow from the fan directly onto the entire board and pushing it out the exits (dropping my max temps when running stress by about 3°C). I'm thinking my revised design will help even more. There are two flat pieces holding the board in place by the two mount points near the SD card slot. The front is held by the outter shells of the USB ports (without stress on the ports).
Anyways, I wanted to share my design and open it up to feedback. The LXF file for LDD can be downloaded
from my Google Drive here. I've also included photos of renderings, care of BlueRender.
