Design Goals
The primary goals are to create an enclosure that will:
- Provide a beautiful enclosure for Raspberry Pi, Arduino, Spark, or LittleBits-based projects. As always, get the project off the lab bench and into the living room.
- Neatly organize cabling. Make cables ‘go away’ (disappear) as much as possible.
- Allow very quick removal of electronics. The enclosure is not a barrier to working on the electronics or even showing others the internal components. Access to the electronics should take seconds.
- Be re-usable. Provide a high degree of capability to re-use the enclosure across projects. This allows quick prototyping, rapid hacking, and encourages getting projects off the lab bench.
- What else???
Design Principles
- Use natural or traditional materials (such as wood, stone, glass) wherever possible.
- These are the materials that typically make up our home environment.
- Use warm, natural colors
- This follows Alexander’s pattern A250
- Use dimensions based on a Fibonacci sequence beginning with 0.25 inches wherever possible on visible parts.
- The use of a Fibonacci sequence reflects the modular nature of the system.
- This establishes a preferred number for dimensions.
- This is aligned with Alexander’s A240 pattern and follows the Golden Ratio pattern.
- Use timeless design styling by blending ancient and modern design elements.
Early Sketches
Here’s a Raspberry Pi B+… A nice compact platform:
But look what happens when you add cables:
An enclosure that doesn’t address the cabling will just put a nice box around the electronics and still leave unattractive cables all over the place. Therefore, the enclosure should deal with this and not just seek to be minimal in size.
Here is an early concept sketch:
Design Constraints
To be determined…
Preliminary Design
Still considering…