Friday 2 November 2012

Pikea: A Custom Raspberry Pi Enclosure From an Ikea Plastic Food Container

After a long and disappointing[1] wait for my Raspberry Pi, friend and colleague Barry Carroll graciously gifted his one to me before I departed for Canada.

I finally got around to setting up OpenElec 2.0 on it as a media server to use in conjunction with my DNS-323 NAS, which works really well when you add the Android XBMC Remote into the mix.

I wanted an enclosure to keep it tidy and contained. A lot of the mass-produced ones available online are quite expensive so I had a rummage around the house to see what would suit. I found a small plastic  food container that my wife and I had purchased a few days earlier in Ikea; I believe it's part of the PRUTA set.


The board of Pi was big enough to fit in the top of the container but too big for the Pi to sit in the bottom of it.

All of the openings I created free hand using a Stanley (utility) knife, so if you feel like creating your own, use extreme caution! Alternatively, something like a Dremmel would be a good choice, but I didn't have one to hand.

I only made holes for the connections I'm using; HDMI, Ethernet, power and SD card. I marked holes for the USB and audio jack in case I need access to them in future. Making a hole for the RCA video connector was necessary, otherwise the Pi wont fit in this container.

Finished enclosure with ventilation holes in the lid



Notches were cut out for the corners of the board to make sure it remained seated. This also steadied the Pi when inserting/removing cables.



[1] - This deserves a blog post in its own right; suffice to say that Farnell/UPS made two failed attempts to deliver my Raspberry Pi to my office - an address that I've seen a UPS van outside of almost every day.