Raspberry Pi cases

One topic of debate regarding the Raspberry Pi is the case to keep it in. It will be delivered as the bare minimum (which is what you pay for, at $35) motherboard and ports for all your wires and gadgets, so you may want to go to some measures of protecting it, as its a pretty well educated guess that the slightest bit of wear and tear will break some vital part of the hardware. So, how should you go about getting a case? Here are your two options:

Buy one

Your main option is of course to buy a default case – there is one (or possibly a few that i haven’t seen) available from the creators of the actual Raspberry Pi, but then a lot of people have designed their own; a lot of which are shown on this website:

http://www.thingiverse.com/search?q=raspberry&sa=Search

If you do buy a case online, make sure it is a trusted site, as it may not have the right ventilation, and it may not be an easily removable case – which pretty much defeats the object in having a Raspberry Pi.

Another site is ModMyPi, which i wrote a review of here:
http://dannyhodge.hubpages.com/hub/Cheap-high-quality-Raspberry-Pi-cases

There have been a lot of designs created through the use of Lego – which actually fits the Raspberry Pi very well, seeing as it is such a simplistic design (despite the complex hardware involved), which could be shown through the simple case. And, what is more ‘easily removable’ than lego? So, maybe it would be a good idea to buy one of these?

Make your own

This sounds brilliant – making your own case for a very personal computer, so that every part of it relates to you. What could the problem be with that?
Well, depending on what you’re going to make it with, it could be very difficult. The best cases will be made out of plastic, and if you know about manipulating plastic, and creating necessary ventilation, then sure, thats fine, you can do it. But if not, you are a bit screwed, however don’t worry, not all hope is lost!

With the high amount of people pre-ordering this, it will be a very popular business idea to start making custom cases – meaning you can design it, send your design off to someone, and they create it and send it off to you. A bit like very personal shopping, you could say.

My favorite example of a personal case is shown in the video below.