Cooler Master’s Pi CASE 40, a travel case for the Raspberry Pi 4 has gone live on Kickstarter and fully funded in the first hour. In fact it has smashed through the $100k barrier and it still has 28 days to go! The pledges for this project start from $26, for a case and a set of VESA mounts, rising to $305 for a customized Pi CASE 40. All of the pledges aim to ship in September 2020.
The Pi CASE 40 is an aluminum case with a TPU bumper wrapped around the sides of the case. The aluminum construction acts as a large heat sink, passively cooling by pulling heat from the Raspberry Pi 4 thanks to an integrated column of aluminum that attaches directly to the CPU. The case can be mounted to a monitor or television via VESA brackets.
The Pi CASE 40 has cut-outs for all of the ports on a Raspberry Pi 4, and a slit in the TPU bumper enables the camera and display ribbon cables to be routed outside of the case. The GPIO is accessible via a hatch on the side of the case, and all 40 of the GPIO pins are available externally via a right angled breakout board. HATs and add on boards can be used with this breakout board, either directly or via another extension or breakout board.
Cooler Master have also added an often requested feature, a power button. The Raspberry Pi famously has no power button, but with this case there is a user programmable power button that can be used to run scripts.
The Pi CASE 40 is an open source project, developed by Pi enthusiasts in house at Cooler Master. Cooler Master chose Kickstarter to fund the project as a means “to get feedback from professionals and hardcore hobbyists to make this product one that they'll love to use.”
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Les Pounder is an associate editor at Tom's Hardware. He is a creative technologist and for seven years has created projects to educate and inspire minds both young and old. He has worked with the Raspberry Pi Foundation to write and deliver their teacher training program "Picademy".
