Design of the Week: Raspberry Pie Case

By on August 30th, 2015 in Design

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This week’s selection is the tasty-looking Raspberry Pie Case by designer Marco Valenzuela. 

There are a seemingly infinite number of Raspberry Pi cases, each able to accommodate the highly popular single-board computing platform, but we haven’t seen one quite like this before. 

The case is literally designed like a pie, you know, the kind you’d get out of the oven. In this case, the “Pie Case” comes out of your 3D printer. 

Printing the case is straightforward; it is only two parts that snap together easily. The more tricky part is to properly finish the case. In the image at top, you can see that the print has been carefully painted to bring out the appearance of fresh-baked pastry. In fact, depending on how fine you’ve printed this case, you might even want to consider sanding to top section to ensure it has a very smooth surface. The game here, obviously, is to make the case look as much like a pie as possible. 

The 3D model is incredibly well done. Here you can see a detailed section of the case lid, showing the irregular surface simulates pastry quite well. We’re interested to find out how Valenzuela produced this 3D model. Perhaps he literally did bake a real pie and 3D scanned it! 

As nice as this case is, there is one problem with it: it’s designed for the original Raspberry Pi and does not have enough holes to accommodate the extra ports on the now-current Raspberry Pi 2. Perhaps Valenzuela will provide an updated version in the future. 

Can you print this item yourself? Certainly – it’s available for free download from MyMiniFactory, along with many other terrific 3D models all pre-tested to ensure successful 3D printing. 

Via MyMiniFactory

By Kerry Stevenson

Kerry Stevenson, aka "General Fabb" has written over 8,000 stories on 3D printing at Fabbaloo since he launched the venture in 2007, with an intention to promote and grow the incredible technology of 3D printing across the world. So far, it seems to be working!