Just in time for some weekend fun, I received the BPI R4 PRO case and I thought about sharing some details for the curious folks.
As for size…the case is big. Depth wise is just as deep as the bare motherboard. Lenght is supposed to be able to hold the BE19000 sticking out of the board and then… some more like 2-4cm that I’m plannig to use to mount the two 40x10 side fans designed in the case.
Very cool a bottom hatch that gives direct access to the SSDs slots below the board. That’s nice.
When you assemble the board, it gets like this:
Took me a while to realize that the rail was to hold the front antenna’s connectors so that you can slide in the front but also operate the case open without going mad with short pigtails. Another nice touch.
The BE14000 board I bought was not the v1.1 I was expecting but still has a different build from the ones I bought before. Nasty thing is that the BE14000 came with no heatsink and… more upsetting no (super annoyingly tiny) M2 screws to clamp it to the mainboard. Lucky me, I had a couple spare, if not… you’re in trouble. For the heatsink, I’m trying to find something that will fit, work in progress.
When you screw in the rail, it will look like this… nice to operate open, especially when developing/debugging stuff.
And when you slide in the front cover it look like this, front and back:
Since I mounted both the BE14000 and the RM-520N-GL LTE modem, I decided to mount all the antennas to the front and in order to minimize pigtails connections: the 4 for LTEs then the 3+3 for wifi are kind of a big array. We’ll have to see how that goes for SNR performance.
I’m now waiting for the 2 40x10 fans and a few heatsinks to arrive to close the build.
