Pimp your Pi
Turn the lil’ Raspberry Pi into a showstopper!
Apart from building wonderful projects, you can invest in some wonderful accessories to make your Pi look pretty. Pimoroni’s PiBow cases are extremely popular and come in a range of shapes and sizes. We favour the slimline Coupé models, which allow access to the GPIO pins and have a cutout on the lid so that a heatsink can be installed on the SoC. If you’re going to be doing prototyping, you can replace the base with a larger one that accommodates a 400-pin (or two 170-pin) breadboard. This keeps your projects a little neater and tidier.
If you have access to a 3D printer, or a 3D printing service, then you can go one step further and design your own case. The quality and range of materials available have evolved significantly over the past few years. Gone are the days where your print, if it worked, would be a lumpy, off-white insult to your design. These wood-finish materials are impressive, and you’ll find all kinds of designs on sites such as www.thingiverse. com, so you can start with something having the correct dimensions – always handy!
Hey big spender maker!
Forget Chromebooks, PiBooks is where it’s at! Alright, at £260 it’s not cheap, but the PiTop puts your Pi (not included) in a neat laptop form factor in a bright green hue. Slide the keyboard forward and you’ll find a whole area for prototyping and playing with your Pi. The PiTop comes with an exclusive Inventors’ Kit that includes projects to get you started with GPIO, sensors and coding.
Thanks to the enthusiastic maker community there are a number of things you can make that require little more skills than putting together LEGO. In fact, here’s one that you can even incorporate into a LEGO project. For this outing, we’re going to transform the Pi into a fully functional tablet, complete with LEGO-compatible mountings on the back, courtesy of the Smart Pi Touch case (available from ModMyPi for £22.99).This project is enabled by the official display kit for the Raspberry Pi.
There have been a few display options for the Pi: three-line LCD displays and small, low-resolution panels have been around for almost as long as the Pi itself, but these are generally not suitable for normal desktop activities. Larger displays eventually became available, but these required complicated soldering on to driver boards, and often required lots of effort to make them work with Linux. This early generation of displays also used lots of GPIO pins, so that if you wanted to use them and a display, then you were out of luck.
Seeing the need, the Raspberry Pi Foundation designed a marvellous seven-inch 800x480 display that’s easy enough to put together and, thanks to the DSI Ribbon connection, doesn’t need to use any GPIO pins on the Pi. The Pi mounts nicely on the back of the display, and if you don’t want to leech power via the Pi’s 5V pins, then the display driver board can instead draw power via its own micro-USB connection.