I arrived at Pi Towers the other day to a sea of stumpy red and black cylinders dotted across all of our engineers’ desks. Now, we’re not allowed to take things off engineers’ desks in case they’re secret blueprints for Raspberry Pi 8 or something, but I checked the fine print and there’s nothing about playing with things on their desks, so I went to have a look.
Turns out they were very neat SD card holders featuring a secure screw-top lid design with a Raspberry Pi logo on it.
SD card hoarder
On to the next question: what kind of person needs to carry around more than one or two SD cards on any given day? I asked our Maker in Residence, Toby, who made all of these miniature gifts. He explained that the engineer who originally requested a bespoke solution to organise his SD cards tests our hardware and software on many different operating systems, so he needs multiple SD cards flashed and ready to go with various bits of software.
A neat 3D-printed case is a much more attractive solution than a ziplock sandwich bag or a crumb-filled pocket, or whatever else my esteemed colleagues resorted to previously. I dread to think.
Lovingly recreated design
There was no need to reinvent the wheel. Toby found this microSD Card Case design by Tom on Printables. It’s one of three “threaded jar” designs featured on Tom’s profile; I especially like the bluey pinky dual-tone filament used for this one.
While Tom wins in terms of jazzy filament colours, our Toby wins for his addition of the Raspberry Pi logo to the lid. To do that, he took the .stl file of Tom’s lid and loaded it into Fusion 360. Then he changed the file to a mesh, imported a Raspberry Pi logo as a sketch, and extruded the logo to remove 1mm of the lid; this left the logo embossed.
Raspberry red filament
Toby printed the SD card boxes using the bespoke Raspberry Pi red PLA filament that Micro Center made for us for the lid, and normal black PLA for the base.
Bespoke gifts are the best kind
While I don’t need a case for the [What? – Ed.] that I carry on my person, I don’t feel left out of the bespoke gift creation going on at Pi Towers. Just last month, I requested something practical and tasteful to help me perform my own job, and our maker in residence came through. Now my desk is adorned with this faux-Baroque frame housing an e-paper screen slowly crawling through Elf at a frame rate which stretches the film out across an entire month. It’s super helpful and just as fabulous as a Raspberry Pi-branded SD card box.
