I spent some time this weekend cleaning out my office with the help of my youngest son. His form of help, of course, revolved around the serious questions in life: "Dad, what's this? What's this?" asked, of course, when he came across items he hadn't before seen.
And then he came across my cache of Raspberry Pi's. I do have several. Maybe a couple more than several. Regardless, he grabbed one and proceeded to tell me how the Raspberry Pi standard o/s, Raspbian, still uses version 2 of Scratch and that he doesn't like the new version of Scratch and, hey, dad, can I have this Raspberry Pi so I can use the old version of Scratch?
Well of course I'm not going to say no. Definitely! I even found him a micro-sd card for it.
As I continued to putz about he also wandered over to my collection of Lego and suggested that we build a lego case for his new Pi.
Oh yeah. Let's do that! I quickly forgot about cleaning my office and we proceeded to fiddle and fuddle with Lego.
We went through several permutations of the base before settling on something we were both happy with. My original idea was to use the technics pieces I have to build a case that could be modular, but neither of us were happy with how it turned out. He had the idea of using blocks to build a box, and that worked until the peripheries were blocked. The goal we had was to build a case that would hold the Pi still while still leaving all the ports, including the I/O pins, available. This was how we ended up tackling that:
Flat baseplates were used as... well.. as the base, with a number of 1-by-X's to hold the Pi in place. I was concerned at first that the power cord wouldn't fit but, as you can see, it did.
You'll also see on that first photo that the GPIO pins were not exactly easily accessible. My son claimed he didn't mind, but I feel that the GPIO pins are what sets a Raspberry Pi apart from a standard computer, so I did some modifications to make sure they were still available.
Here is a top-down view of what turned out to be the final design. Not only are the GPIO ports available, but so is the camera port.
The only part of the build that I don't really like is the excess space on the one side; it offends my OCD. I'm sure that with some more re-jiggering of the design I could fix that, but I was happy with what we have. But since the space was available, I added one final touch: a zombie-ghost.
Honestly, I'm thinking that's what I must look like in the morning before coffee.
My son wants to use this for Scratch. Of course, I'm now thinking I want to use it to build a car.
(c) All images and photographs, unless otherwise specified, are created and owned by me.
(c) Victor Wiebe
About Me
Amateur photographer. Wannabe author. Game designer. I dabble a little in a lot. General all around problem-solver and creative type.
Founder of Photo 52 weekly photography competition.
Expert generalist. Jack of all Trades.
Dad.
Tags I Use
| Photography | ||
| #photo52 | #altphoto | #crappycameraphotos |
| #digitalpinhole | #pinhole | #firehydrant |
| Lego | ||
| #spaceforce3 | ||
