rackmount case

And potentially spoiling the behaviour of some other digital devices IME.

only if you want to tart a fire.

the inductor in a buck converter is an essential part.

Actually, I was thinking of me rather than you :-)

Musing that if you had a single Pi there might be scope for integrating it into the casing of an active PC, perhaps in a spare drive bay.

If there is sufficient +5v from the PSU or (MoBo is you steal a USB port) plus room to wire into the local Ethernet then you could have a headless Pi neatly housed within the current footprint.

I wasn't contemplating using a PC casing solely for housing Pis.

Cheers

Dave R

OK. Thanks for the info.

I have and it is (6mm cylindrical cutter in a Dremel, 3mm alloy case, but the showers of alloy splinters that this produced were a bit too sharp for comfort.

I think the fly in that ointment will be the cabling.

A neat solution would be to use a plastic blanking plate with a slot cut in it for access to the SD card, *but* the micro-SD connection will be in the way and I suspect that even a right-angle plug (if you can find one) will be too bulky to let the SD card stick out through the slot, but you can use one of the other USB sockets for a neat power supply since most USB adapter cards have spare sockets inside the case.

However, the Ethernet cable may require an ugly kludge; I've never seen Ethernet adapters or motherboards with an Ethernet connector on the inside of the case, so its likely that you'd have to let the CAT5 cable emerge from the case before looping round to one of the RJ45s on the back.

Pity, because I like your idea.

On 20/08/2013 20:46, Martin Gregorie wrote:>

You could use a USB ethernet adapter and wire it to an internal header. Added bonus is that you don't tie up the PC's NIC.

I'm semi-certain that some Ethernet cards can be connected to a separate rear panel bracket. In which case one could modifyt the cable which links the card to the bracket. Or it might be possible to modify slightly the metal bracket on the back of the card.

you can get punchdown RJ45 sockets than mount in panels easily enough.

e.g.

and plenty of gash PCI cards that people have in their scrapboxes have a blanking plate suitably punched.

The cheap chassis that I have here, has a thin plate with holes punched to allow access to all of the USB and ethernet stuff on the micro atx board.

easy enough to wire a suitable pushfit socket to the Pi.

Or use a spare USB header on the mobo (that could also be used for power) and usbnet.

Typically this is on a riser plane PCB that plugs into a socket on the main board, it's probably easier to notch the slot cover attached to the ethernet card so that it can pass a looped-back ethernet cable than to have a new riser manufactured. I've never seen a PCI or PCIe

OTOH if you don't need a lot of network bandwidth you could use a FTDI(tm) usb-to-uart cable and run a PPP or SLIP service over it to the raspberry pi UART.