Build Instructions

Collapse

• 1

  3D Modeling

  My build started in Fusion 360. First modeling everything that needed to fit within the back and arranged them somewhat to fit tightly. I left room for a raspberry pi, which I did not model because I measured the space between the components and found it would fit. Saved a little bit of time there.
  
  

  
  
  I then started the arduous process of building a shell around the components. First the back-plane of the pack, adding a little extra support to the battery pack.  Including some ridges for it to fit together with the main shell and room for my spine
  
  
  Don't forget to sink your your bolts back. I decided not to countersink, because I didn't want to print with supports for the ridged portion. In the printing section you'll see how to achieve a sunken bolt hole  without support material.
  
  I then built the shell around each part, adding indention around components for them to slot within. Again I tried to model this so that it could print with the least amount of support material as possible.
  
  

  
  

  There are definitely areas to improve the shell. Like where the top plane meets the raised ridge lines, the cross section is rather small.
  

  Lastly, I designed some strap components for the pack.
  

  
  

  All things improve with time, however it'll work for now! So on to step two!

  Oh well before that, let me know if you have any questions about the modeling, I'll do my best to answer them! :)
  

• 2

  3D Printing

  To print bolt holes, offset from the plane of the printer, I created 4 cylinders and aligned them a layer or two below where the hole would start to print. Each cylinder is a solid model, two layers thick. Once sliced, support will not need to be generated, since the slicer will treat it as a bridged surface and then build the hole on top of the surface.
  

  
  The larger shell was mostly designed to be self supporting, so I added in a few boxes of no support zones.
  
  Everything took me about 3 days to print. The 3mf files can be found the files section. Happy Printing.
  

• 3

  Assembly of Pack Components!

  I started with a two pin Molex connector, which the batteries from Batteryspace.com comes with as an optional add on for their batteries. Snipping all of the usb lines, and connecting power and ground to the molex connector with those solder-in-heatshrink jumpers
  

  The  power lines are for the following:

  1. USB C for Raspberry Pi4
  2. Micro USB for Touch Screen
  3. Output for the Neopixel LED's in my tvhead.

  
  Sorry, the photo is not great, I took it after the fact. In the back, you can see the two solder-in-heatshrink jumpers. The molex connector is rather blurry on the right side of the photo. The Black usb in back, is power and the blue usb is touch data going to the pi. The grey cable is the power line for my tvhead, and the black cable is the usb power line for the raspberry pi.
  

  After everything was soldered together, I started to place the components in the shell of the pack. The build is simple, connecting a raspberry pi HDMI and usb to the touch screen. That's all that's really needed besides power.
  

View all 9 instructions