When the first Raspberry Pi was launched three years ago there was an eruption of third party produced cases hitting the market with all sorts of weird, colourful and wonderful designs. Now the Raspberry Pi foundation has at last launched its own official case, made to perfectly fit its microcomputer circuit board range.
A blog post on the The Raspberry Pi foundation homepage reveals that an own made and branded case has been under consideration for quite some time. It had to be a product that is affordable, "but with the kind of real beauty and design that our products try to encompass," wrote Director of Software Gordon Hollingworth.
The case design comes from Kinneir Dufort with some input from the folk at the Raspberry Pi foundation thrown in. After months of prototyping, communications and refinement, then deciding upon a single design, the above case design was decided upon. You can see the chosen case next to the other two of the top three designs below.
The final three
Following the product brief, Kinneir Dufort says that its final case design can "enhance the goods inside and in no way could obstruct the many connection points and ports the Raspberry Pi has". You can see that the top and sides of the case are removable, which might be to your preference depending upon your deployment or environment. Furthemore the designers say that it is designed to be hacked – with specific areas of weakness to allow the user to drill through it, or mount it.
Below you can see the new case with a HAT installed, viewable via the case window.
The new case will be manufactured in Dudley, UK by injection moulding company T-Zero. The Raspberry Pi blog goes into quite some detail about how the injection moulding process works, if you are interested in that. The quality of the finished cases is said to be "awesome," and they snap and unsnap with reassuring positivity providing a colourful product with a perfect fit.
Official Raspberry Pi cases are available direct from the foundation for £6, or via the usual outlets of element14, or RS Electronics. In the USA you can get them from MCM Electronics, Newark and Allied .
