Raspberry Pi Cases Made at Home Using Laser Cutter

The Raspberry Pi is a barebones SBC. While an official case exists, the board does not ship with one by default unless you’ve bundled it with a kit. Nevertheless, it leads many makers down the creative path of creating their cases. Today we’ve got an impressive DIY option from maker Michael Klements who’s using a laser cutter to construct original Raspberry Pi cases from wood.

Klements’ YouTube channel focuses on a wide variety of tech, including microelectronics projects and reviews of whatever hardware interests him along the way. For example, he recently got his hands on a new Atomstack laser engraving and cutting machine. He used this opportunity to review the unit and break down his laser-cut case creation process for any interested parties.

In this demonstration, Klements is creating a case for a Raspberry Pi 4 out of 3mm plywood cut using an . The Pi resides inside, utilizing a series of M2.5 12mm brass standoffs and some 6mm screws. Klements even included top-mounted fan support, using M3 screws to secure it.

You don’t need expensive software to create compatible files for the laser cutting machine. According to Klements, all he needed for the Raspberry Pi case design was Inkscape—a free, open-source vector graphics application. The most significant investment for this project is the Atomstack X7 40W laser engraving and cutting machine.

Enable snaps on Raspberry Pi and install inkscape

Snaps are applications packaged with all their dependencies to run on all popular Linux distributions from a single build. They update automatically and roll back gracefully.

Snaps are discoverable and installable from the Snap Store, an app store with an audience of millions.

Enable snapd

On a Raspberry Pi running the latest version of Raspberry Pi OS snap can be installed directly from the command line:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install snapd

You will also need to reboot your device:

sudo reboot

After this, install the core snap in order to get the latest snapd:

sudo snap install core

Install inkscape

To install inkscape, simply use the following command:

sudo snap install inkscape

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