Rock Pi S 3D CAD and 3D Printed Enclosure

I’ve had some fun this weekend designing a cheap remote backup server for my parents based on Armbian running on a Rock Pi S (stay tuned). However for such a versatile little SBC, there is a surprising lack of free CAD models in the wild. So, since I needed to design a simple housing for this anyway I decided I’d whip up some models and share them on Github.

First up I roughly modelled the printed circuit board, paying special attention to the high profile components and the external connectors. I’m no mechanical engineer, and for these one off’s I don’t waste a lot of time with unnecessary detail. Maybe I’ll come back and tune the PCA model later when I end up using this board again in the future.

The enclosure design for this SBC was much more simple than many of my previous, as the aim was to keep a low profile. I decided to thread the bolts from the bottom up, so I could make use of the height already consumed by the tall connectors for the screw thread. The external wall was set to 2mm, as this tends to be the sweet spot for my Up! mini printer, dropping any lower the structural integrity can be a bit hit or miss. I took some inspiration from some raspberry pi cases I’ve seen where they leave the top side of the connectors flush with the case. I think this is a smart use of of the space, ESD shouldn’t really be a concern here as the connector shielding is usually one of the most tested and protected discharge paths in electronics.

The end result didn’t turn out too shabby if I must say so myself, and it’s a quick print due to it’s simplicity. I hope we get some more community pickup of this board, and hopefully that leads to better mainline kernel support in Armbian. I’ll be keeping a keen eye out for more projects using this SBC in the future. If anyone wants to build one of these enclosures, check out the instructions.