I’ve been having a think about what to do with my LattePanda since I got it and a number of options were on the table. A mini server for development purposes, a media controller, you get the picture however I couldn’t really settle on anything.
In some ways I kind of put this down to spending so much time thinking about the case. As you my be aware, I got my LattePanda with the standard acrylic case and whilst it serves a purpose, for me it didn’t really float my boat and I reckon a number of users will have soon ditched that and gone down the custom route.
This is what I decided I was going to do and in the process I was going to do something about the cooling on the board. Whilst the LattePanda is great, it does have one flaw and a significant one at that. The thermals on this are a bit high probably due to the design and layout of certain components however when pushed it does cause the CPU to throttle and throttle it does all the way down to 400mhz!
Whilst deciding on my new case I noticed the LattePanda team had released via DFRobot a new slimline fan for the board and I thought that if I and applied this to the heat spreader of the cpu and added copper sinks to the other side of the board then this would solve the heat problems.
One fan duly ordered along with the touch screen overlay that I should have ordered when I backed the Kickstarter project. A few days passed and everything arrived from China, perfect service!
The fan and heat sinks have brought down the temps significantly and the touch screen works a treat except I still didn’t have the case I wanted.
Now it’s at this point in time I seriously started looking at buying a 3D printer – yes I was going to make a case from scratch, well one I’d found on Thingiverse at least. I’d pretty much got to the point of deciding which model to go for when for some strange reason I came across 3D Hubs (unfortunately is no more). I’d never heard of this before but basically it’s a group of people and/or companies that will effectively hire out their 3D printer to you and they will print your model for a reasonable fee.
3 days later and my new enclosure arrived, you can see it below in all it’s glory with the LattePanda fixed in place. I’ve used some brass standoffs to give the LattePanda a little room so that the fan does not catch the back of the case but as you can see, it works a treat.
You can see the full sized image by clicking on the thumbs but for a video tour of this then why not check out the video I posted on my Youtube channel and don’t forget to subscribe there so that you get notified when I post more LattePanda videos online.
