Me and the RaspberryPi /10

As I wrote in a previous post, last Monday I received my Raspberry Pi computer.

Of course the first think I did was to put it into my case prototype.

I found some little inaccuracies in the (estimated) position of some connectors, and I could eventually see the kind of SD card slot (invisible up to now in all the photos I found on the web: none seems to find the bottom interesting!).

Here is how it looks:

I also fixed the led lightguides to the upper part by hot glue. Even if I correctly positioned the LEDs in the model of the board, there is a little misalignment, partly due to the fact that little interferences (mainly between the bottom and the SD connector) make the board to be not in the right place into the box (it’s a bit shifted towards the usb ports). Furthermore the red (Power) LED is really too bright so that there is some diffusion inside:

Trying to well position the led guides, the light distribution improves a little. Here is how it looks when also the (less bright) green LED (Read/Write card activity) is working:

It is not exactly the best light distribution in the world, but I think that it’s really hard to do better here, because the five LEDs are really small, close each other and far from the cover; furthermore the high brightness of the power led doesn’t help at all.

The second thing I did was… to boot it (using the Debian image downloaded from the Raspberry Pi website). But it has nothing to do with the subject of this article! 😉

The third thing I did was to fix the model of the Raspberry Pi board I did. With the corrected version of the board, the whole assembled 3D model looked the same as the real one: this was proving that things were going well…

Then I quickly fixed the bugs I found as described above. That was also an occasion to make little changes that come into my mind in the past few days. Mainly I didn’t like the holes on the logo, so I wanted to make apertures (even if unnecessary, because really very little heat is produced)   in a different way.

Here is the new (and maybe definitive) look:

Now the next step will be to upload this updated model to Shapeways to make a new test prototype. I’m also thinking about the possibility to consider it a Release-Candidate, i.e. to make it available for purchasing to all my impatient fans. 😉

Well, actually the first item, the one blindly designed, is completely usable even if not perfect: so this one should be better.

Let me sleep on it tonight… 😉

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