Tuesday 22nd July 2014: 11.30pm.
Spent most of Sunday and far too much of Monday sorting out this handmade case for the nVidia Jetson TK1 board I bought - it's an excellent example of why it makes sense to simply buy a case actually, as I lost four hours of work time on Monday finishing the case which far more than a case would have cost. Anyway, the case is made out of two green acrylic sheets from eBay (cost £1) and a sheet of transparent polycarbonate donated by my brother in law. The design (if you use my schematic watch out for the mistakes BTW, I got some of my measurements wrong as I'm not used to working in inches and unfortunately the board is exactly 5" by 5" so I was forced to) came partially from the internet, but with an added two holes for the heatsink and the SATA power connector, plus an extra space for my finger to find the power button. I also added a SATA drive bay for the SSD, and used motherboard standoffs of which I have a legion with M4 screws, also left over from motherboards, to make the corner supports. The work of making it almost entirely was done by my talented brother in law, all I really did was to make a paper and then cardboard prototype and he duplicated it into the acrylic and polycarbonate, though I did sand down the sharp edges into a smooth finish as it being otherwise would annoy me.
I made many mistakes to be honest. Of those major the first was that the holes drilled should have been much more exact (only the give in the standoffs saved me), the second was that I forgot about the motherboard SATA plug height when calculating the countersink for the transparent top and you'll see little plastic green spacers added to cope with that, and the third I fluffed the SATA drive by forgetting that the connectors need space off the bottom of the drive, so I should have had the drive edge perfectly flush with the side of the acrylic - I ended up loosening the retaining screws, and jamming the cables in to create tension.
And hell, given it'll never leave the back of my workstation and its likely hardest experience will be a screwdriver accidentally falling on it, it's more than plenty durable enough. I just wanted something to prevent static shock from the curtains and to defect any metal things falling on it by accident, and even the cardboard mockup would have been fine for those.
Cardboard ain't as pretty as shiny plastic though! :)
#jetsontk1 #tegrak1
