I recently put together a Raspberry Pi media player with a 2.5″ hard disk to go with it. Just the Geekworm board and Pi look a little lonely and not very aesthetically pleasing. I was looking for a case, but really didn’t like many of them. Pretty plain plastic or metal boxes. Then I saw an example of an Art Deco style case. I did some research on older, art deco, radios to see how they were styled. With a little inspriation I created one of my own.
I have plenty of spare wood around the house. I seem to collect raw lumber like a squirrel collects nuts. I started poking around looking for a couple of types that would contrast nicely with each other. The Bird’s Eye Maple comes from the UP of Michigan. The Cherry is from someplace local, but I can’t be much more specific than that. The two pieces were tacked together with hot glue so that when I made the corner cut thy would be identical.
I like to be able to see things when I am building. This project is more less off the top of my head so I don’t have many notes. I made a cardboard template of the Geekworm SATA board.
The original idea was to make a grill of copper tubing. The tubes had sand in them so I could bend them to the same curve as the panels. I could not, NOT, find a way to get the copper to adhere to one another. Epoxies, supers, JB weld, and even tried soldering, no luck. There comes a point in time to just cut bait and move on to Plan B.
Plan B is taking an old office container for holding paperclips and the such, cut off the bottom and top rim and create a wire grill to put on the front. At the same time I also switch to using wood dowels to go between the halves.
I have 3 final items to finish up. The way the ports are situated, either the power or the HDMI sticks out the back. When the power is out the back; the 90 degree HDMI connector makes the mounting it vertically too tall. When the board is mounted horizontally the HDMI is out the back the power is on the bottom. A 90 degree power adapter is shorter; so there is one on order.
Until those parts come in it time to sand it down a little more and make sure the grain really pops.
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