I designed a custom Raspberry Pi Zero holder for the desks.
Equipment/Software:
- 3D Printer
- Raspberry Pi Zeros
- Ribbon cables/connectors
- Fusion 360
- Power cables
Prototype
I was not sure how to execute what I wanted to accomplish with the Raspberry Pi holders. At first, I wanted to attach the holders to the front of the desk legs in the middle so that they were out of the way but still accessible. However, after we 3D printed them, we could not figure out a good way to create brackets to secure them to the desk legs. We also realized that this was impractical, especially if we wanted to use the GPIO pins in the future. This Pi holder design would also make it so that the table couldn’t be moved around since they would bind two tables together meaning that a new Pi holder would need to be designed if the desks were ever separated. This led to us deciding to make Pi holders that will individually sit on top of the desk, yet still look coherent when next to each other in the current setup.
Final
The final design allowed for us to put the Raspberry Pi holders at the corner of a desk with the Raspberry Pi Zero snuggly fitting in and having enough space for the ribbon connectors and power cables. This makes the Pi holders able to hold the Pi’s and the accessories needed to utilize them to their full potential. These Pi holders needed to work effectively, but also be appealing to the eye which inspired the design of the lid. To design the lid, I started by creating a SVG file of triangular patterns then importing that into the Fusion using the extrude tool to create the different depths.
Another thing that I added to the final design was vinyl labels to access the SSH and VNC. To do this, we had to set up two port forwards per Pi allowing for anyone to connect to the Pi’s if they are on Sacred Heat Wi-Fi. This will allow for users to be able to see the full desktop and GUI of the Raspberry Pi with VNC or to just use the command line using SSH. It also allows for all GPIO pins to be accessed and usable with a breadboard making it easy to attach sensors, so the Raspberry Pi’s are fully functional.