'Chomp the Alligator' Raspberry Pi Case by 3D_NUTS

Last crawled date: 3 years, 1 month ago

UPDATE!! DON'T PRINT YET! I found that I have to separate the files, as the two sides are technically connected in this file. Will upload soon. Sorry!
NOM NOM NOM!!! This is my entry for the Raspberry Pi Case Design Contest held by the Raspberry Pi Foundation, i.Materialize, and AutoDesk123D. I have never printed it, but look to in the future.
I want to first start out by saying I'm a horrible designer. I took a CAD class in college, but that its. I've got no keen eye for design either, I'm an engineer. Most of my previous designs have been based on a set of rigid specifications for a very specific purpose. This design meets none of those requirements, and its definitely not optimized for 3D printing either. When I first saw this contest, I decided to step out of my traditional mold and design something fun that even my kids would enjoy. Using TinkerCAD is a great tool for someone like me, and I found it to be the perfect tool for this design as well. I found a very good base design on Thingiverse, http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:44633, this is something that I could never design on my own, no matter how good of a tool I had. I was able to stretch it to fit the board, and only missed the specifications by .03mm (I hope thats ok!)
Although it seems like this would be an easy desing in TinkerCAD, it wasn't. I first had to test how the full head would envelope the board. I quickly found that I had to separate top from the bottom to do this right. I then had to enlarge each of the circuit components to ensure that the top would fit snugly, but not too tight. The pins were pretty difficult, but I think I found a good solution but desinging a vertical pyramid for each one. Though the front pins stick out a little bit, I dont think it will detract from the design at all.
There were a lot of other tweaks and changes that I had to make that better designers would probably have taken a lot less time on. One example is the connector pieces in the back. There are much better ways to connect the two pieces, but due to time constraints I looked for a simple solution. I also made the prongs the exact same size as the holes, which probably wont work well.
Overall, I think I exceeded my goals and expectations on this design. Finding such a wonderful model to start with was great, so I wanted to show it off as best as possible while still leaving the functional ports available. If I win, I definitely will throw the designer @agepbiz some goodies as well.