As I don’t have the most experience with CAD, I thought to browse around to find some existing Raspberry Pi Zero W cases that I could borrow from. The first couple that I found and printed just didn’t fit, like at all, and they were too small for my needs anyway. I stumbled upon aottesen‘s design that he used for a PiHole setup. And after printing his and having it fit quite well, I took to modifying it.

I had the fun of learning Meshmixer for the first time, and spent a good hour or so trying to add a very rough hole for the lights. The model kept collapsing in on itself, so I had to learn about remeshing and then I finally got it printed out.

I didn’t feel like soldering when I initially put it together, since I wasn’t all too sure how it would fit, so I just ran some jumper wires around. Making the wires internal would be an easy job, but I don’t feel like desoldering headers on the Pi I’m using, so I’ll order a few more Pis that I can directly solder to.

I’ve had this plugged into a 20,000mah battery bank for the past day or so and I’ve left the lights blinking away so I can observe power use/battery life as well as reliability. There does appear to be some cases of packet loss or the like, and I since I’m using UDP currently, none of those dropped packets are being resent. Of course this is a big issue if you’re relying on a light to cue a show, even if it only happens 1% of the time. I could try implementing some sort of error correction/detection myself, but it seems easier to implement TCP for the OSC library that I’m using. So that’ll be one of my next steps. I wouldn’t want to release something that is prone to failure.

My next steps are going to be refining the case design, working on the code(it’s honestly pretty hacked together right now), and working on OLED and button support. I’ll try to buy a streamdeck to get support for that going. I’ve thought about designing a stand that integrates a streamdeck mini at the base and the light up top.

I’ll try to do one of these updates posts a week or so. I really enjoyed seeing all the feedback and interest on the reddit post, so I’ll keep publishing what I’m up to.