Designing the Orange Pi Enclosure

With the pivot to a new SBC, a new enclosure is in order.

To meet my adjusted goals (including no custom cabling and a more comfortable assembly), I’ve made some adjustments to the approach. The biggest is the separation of the back peripheral panel. On the last design, it was not easy to get the board in/out of the enclosure because the ports needed to protrude into the peripheral holes. In this design, the back panel is built into the bottom part, which means the board only need to fit into one port panel at a time.

The new design also depends on quality support structures more than the last design. While the previous one was designed to avoid needing them entirely, this one removes that as a design constraint and will depend on them heavily for the main body part. There are plenty of 90 degree overhangs to go around.

Lastly, the single top housing has been replaced by two separate sliding panels, one for each end of the drive drawers. Oh, and no more screws for the drives themselves. Here’s the 2D mockup.

2D mockup of the three parts, the drive panel on top, the main body in middle,
and the bottom/back panel at the bottom.

State of the project repo as of writing: https://git.sr.ht/~jonahbron/ultimate-home-box/tree/d4daa617fb8537a245fcd6d8f46dc7f5938ad612

Next step is to work on the 3D design of the enclosure for printing.