There are many and I mean many Raspberry Pi cases out there. Fucking tons. There are a few great ones and a lot of mediocre ones. I came across a pretty good one. It is a great case and not just because it looks cool. It’s actually function-able. The case is designed to fit a VESA monitor mount. So if you have a TV or monitor on a stand you could bolt this to the rear and bam!. The holes are also great for general purpose mounting. The case is designed slightly different than all the others out there. There is NO CUTOUT for the micro USB power plug. We don’t use it here. This case has room for a DC-DC buck converter. Available on Amazon, eBay and all over. Standard part.
We take a nice big fat power source like 12v DC 3A and knock it down to 5.1v DC for the Pi. Then we wire that output directly to the Pies GPIO pins for 5v and GND. This works great, a nice fat stable power source. And the bricks are far easier to get a hold of then a 3A 5v USB plug. I have tons of them lying around.
We take the barrel plug and solder in a diode to the source side of the DC-DC buck converter. We take the output and apply that to the power GPIO pins for 5v and GND. Then we take a LED and wire in a 330ohm resistor and connect that to GND and GPIO 14 (UART TXD). Heres the trick to get the GPIO pin to follow the Pies power up and power down cycle. So the LED will turn off when the Pi is safe to unplug.
Edit your /boot/config.txt file and add the following line:
enable_uart=1Thats it, now the LED will light when powered on and it will shutoff when it is safe to unplug the Pi. If you wish to use a different pin other than 14 you can follow this guide over here.
The case
Heres the thingy for my modified version of the case. The original calls for brass inserts for the screws, which is awesome I just don’t use them. So I remixed the files to use standard M3 screws. No more brass inserts. I also increased the depth of the lid. My jumper wires were hitting the top of the lid and preventing me from closing it. No I have plenty of room fire wires and jumpers.
My Remixed Case
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2956874
Original Version
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2286741
