Eventually I think it’s best to put some graphic design here. So my temporary solution is to just put a sticky label at the back, thus covering the big empty hole (see picture on the right below). If I leave it alone, it looks quite ugly (see picture on the left below). I am not completely sure what to do with the LCD cutout. Of course since OSPi doesn’t have buttons and LCD, some of the cutouts are useless. It’s a bit tricky to figure out the position precisely, but I am glad that after two rounds of prototypes I finally got it right □ In fact, by carefully positioning the Pi, the Ethernet cable can also fit, albeit through the USB cutout instead of the RJ45 cutout. It also explains why the Pi has to be installed at an angle, as the picture at the top shows. Ouch! But after staring at it for a while like a geometric puzzle, I was delighted to find out that if you rotate RPi by 3 to 4 degrees, it fits perfectly! This gave me inspiration to further develop the idea. It turns out that, due to the positions of the support pillars, the enclosure is just a little bit too narrow to fit RPi at a straight angle. After all, the injection-molded enclosure was made before OSPi came into place, naturally it was not designed with RPi in mind. When I was first fiddling with the idea I didn’t think it was at all possible. But the ‘how’ part proves to a non-trivial engineering challenge. In fact, in the near future OpenSprinkler Beagle will also adopt the same enclosure, and hence all three will have the same exterior look. Using the same enclosure also gives both products a consistent look. This will bring down the cost quite a bit. On the other hand, the microcontroller-based OpenSprinkler already has an injection-molded enclosure (and I paid a good amount of money for the mold!), so it makes sense to consolidate the design to use the same enclosure. The first is cost reduction: the current OSPi uses the Serpac WM032 enclosure with custom cutouts. Wait a minute, what is this strange looking board?! And the Pi is installed at an angle? What’s happening here? Well, the new design is all centered around one simple goal: to fit OSPi and RPi into the existing OpenSprinkler injection-molded enclosure. Curious what the next version of OpenSprinkler Pi (OSPi) is going to look like? Here is a sneakpeak preview of version 1.4:
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