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ModMyPi Raspberry Pi Case Offers 5% Back To the Foundation
An anonymous reader writes "The Raspberry Pi Model B is now available to purchase, but most people are still waiting for new stock to be manufactured and delivered. In the meantime you can prepare for the tiny PC's arrival by figuring out what to do about a case. The fact the Raspberry Pi ships without a case doesn't cause a problem when using it, but encasing it in plastic will help protect and keep the dust off the components. Geek.com has already reported on one case design from hobbyist designer Marco Alici, but now another one has appeared that actually has a release date, color options, and an extra incentive to purchase it."
At the risk of implying a consideration of the long term effect or *shudder* morality into capitalist economics, it is cheaper to have a local manufacturing base than rely completely on some rights-ignoring nation half way across the world. Hell, in under a year I'm sure they could get local manufacuring ramped up to the point that any cost difference is negligible. This is all the more important when you are trying to set an educational example for future domain experts with your product.
And, frankly, the few people put off by having to pay an extra $5 for initial runs will be entirely offset by the PR coup of demonstrating that, yes, it is still possible to build stuff in the West.
But, like I said, it's clear that the Raspberry Pi is just a tacky Broadcom sideline.
Or you're dating only insecure women, because you're insecure yourself?
this says far less about women in general than it does about the apparently limited subset of women who are interested in dating you. perhaps if you were less quick to generalise about the former set based solely on your experiences with the latter set, the size of the latter set would increase.
The hardware acceleration for video on the board is actually quite impressive. It can apparently decode 1080p video in real time, so even if it can't run a modern desktop very fast it can still be useful; there's a port of XMBC so you can use it as a media centre. You have to have proprietary drivers for the graphics acceleration but it's still cool. I'm not sure how integrated into the normal X11 stack these drivers are by now, earlier on in the project you'd just use the graphics library provided and drive the screen without X (as I understood it).
Can't please everybody, but just the other day I thought about how I will mount my Pi when it comes, and now I have a solution handed to me, which even has an incentive that goes beyond meeting my material need.
That's the thing with slashvertisements, they don't bring much discussion value, but they are usually something unique and interesting that I would not have thought to search for. And as long as they don't seriously dilute the more substantial submissions, what's the harm?
I paid $35 for the Raspberry Pi and $5 for shipping. I have no idea where you got the idea they raised there prices. Unless you live in a place that has nice VAT or some other local taxes..
Jesus, so make your own, Mr. Clever. Seriously. 3D printing is so cheap, put your design where your mouth is.
Am I the only one who was thinking something when reading this?
I remember when Linux was good... too...
Actually the headline should be: "Random guy designs pi case that is annoying as hell, pledges money back to foundation to alleviate pain of using it".
The protrusion around the USB ports will create annoyances, ethernet cables won't "click" and lock into place due to the base being in the way and, as you said, the HDMI-port will probably create problems as well. Not really a shining example of good industrial design.
All this bitching about the Raspberry in general and this case goes to show just how fucking hard it is to make a good solid product. We barely think about it but for every product out there we just use without issue, a hell of a lot of people spend a hell of a lot of time, just getting it right.
Take something as simple as a drinks can, you know the kind you get soft-drinks in. Once, they had pull of tabs, and those tabs had sharp edges and they got thrown away and people stepped on them with bare feet and got hurt. That is why nowadays, can's have a opening that opens inwards leaving all bits attached.
It took DECADES for this to change. It might now seem like rocket science but clearly it was.
Apple seems famous for good design yet its white mac-book air, the plastic one, when opened had rounded edges for the bit on your desk, and sharp edges for you to lay your hands on... not very comfortable at all. A minor issue? You would think BUT this issue is known about (how many keyboards have hard sharp edges to lay your wrist on?) and yet, Apple made this mistake again when the problem should have been known as well as the solution.
When you make a thingy like this raspberry board there a million things to think off, often things that someone somewhere has already solved but getting all that knowledge into one place has never been done (go ahead, point me to a resource where every mistake in designing say an MP3 player has been recorded, let alone with the solution) and so mistakes will be re-made and re-solved over and over again.
If you ever think of making your own product, estimate the time you need to make it, then add ten times that time to examine it against all other similar products so you can prevent making the same mistakes they did.
Good luck getting that approved for budget. So more then a hundred years after the first keyboards, we still get keyboards with hard sharp edges biting into our wrists...
And you worry about a cable not clicking.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Ubuntu doesn't run because of Canonical's compilation settings. During a recent fosdem talk, an ARM/Linaro representative expressed dismay that 'armel' is defined differently between debian and Ubuntu.
Ubuntu are focussing on performance over 'legacy' CPUs - the latest debian ought to run - no speed demon, naturally.
As for firefox, well, gecko's not the only browser in town and until recently 256MB was commonplace on webkit-based Android and iOS (iPhone 3GS) devices. Some browsers optimise for performance, others memory usage.
I'm not an "hobbist designer", as written in many blogs. I'm a Mechanical Engineer and I work as Industrial Designer since 2001 (see http://marcoalici.wordpress.com/info). ;)
My case is designed to be printed by Shapeways (http://www.shapeways.com),using highly professional SLS (Selective Laser Sintering), SLA (Stereolithography), and FDM (fused deposition modeling machines. Nothing to do with the overall quality of home/DIY hobbyist fused-wire deposition processes. That's why it's not so cheap.
Just as a clarification.
Best regards,
Marco Alici
What would I do with 256 MB of RAM?
I love these sorts of posts. My first computer had 16K of RAM (TRS-80). I do hobby work with embedded controller CPUs that have a whopping 384 BYTES of RAM, and I can do all sorts of cool things - take temp/pres readings and send them to the mother ship via ZigBee, etc.There are even TCP stacks for these sorts of chips that have somewhat more memory.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
[...] 3D printing is so cheap [...]
*NOW* it feels like the 21st century! Finally!
So say we all