Power & Source of Big Ideas

Suggestion for case

Moderators: chensy, FATechsupport

I use a FLIRC case for my raspberry PI. Basically, the entire case is a heat sink. Here's their page:

https://flirc.tv/products/flirc-raspber ... 5036454120

It's all aluminum, and it makes direct contact with the CPU making the entire case the heat sink. I wanted to suggest you make a similar case because you literally cannot overheat a PI with a FLIRC case, and I've really tried with FFMPEG. Maybe you can partner with them although they are apparently across seas - maybe you can source from China.

I'd never go back to plastic again though for a PI. First, it does overheat if you try, and second, it's kind of cheap and the cost of a full aluminum heat sink compared to plastic, isn't much.

Good luck with your product. Looks like you're a competitor to the PI, but, for me, you're overpowered, but you're apparently available. Make a $35 product with an available case that is $15 dollars out of aluminum that is a full heat sink, and I might be a big customer, but I've not finished the software yet. It just needs to be able to do wifi, ethernet (100 MB/s fine), at least 2 USB ports (3 is the most), an SD Card, and run Linux, that would be great. I'm looking for a storage device that is widely programmable, network connected, and as long as it can feed about 400 KB/s, that's enough for what I'm working on.
The $20 metal case sold by FriendlyElec for the NanoPC-T6 does work this way - one machined or extruded piece of aluminum, with thick metal up top, some exterior grooves for greater surface area, and an extension inside that presses perfectly against the CPU/SoC, with a supplied thermal pad. In my limited testing so far, this cooling scheme has worked well. I haven't seen R6S or R6C's in person, but the cases on their product pages look very similar, so I'd expect them to serve as passive heatsinks as well.

Unfortunately, the cases take smallness to an extreme, and offer no practical means of accessing the GPIO header, thereby sacrificing one of the biggest advantages these rk3588 boards offer over something like an Intel NUC.

I'll be mounting a plastic box to the bottom of mine for I/O expansion (leaving its base plate off - the board can be screwed in securely without this) and had hoped to simply extend a short 40-pin PATA ribbon cable from the top header down to my custom boards, but the board fits so tightly that there's no enough room on any side to pass the ribbon through, and no groove, slit, or other provision for extending GPIO lines outside the case. Even just a standard IDC connector without any ribbon attached is too tall for the board to be mounted flush in that case! Another few mm of height and depth would have made all the difference.

Since I'll only be building a handful of these at most, I'll probably resort to just soldering the cut end of a ribbon to the bottom of the board (backside of the 40-pin through-hole header), but it's disappointing that this is necessary. Lack of GPIO usability with this case seems like a major design shortcoming.

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