My friend and I decided to make a case like this
Absolutely fantastic! Just curious, is that a hard drive mount on the upper part?
You are right. I forgot to mention that there are mounts for a 120 mm fan, a 2.5 inch disk (with cable minimum length 30 cm), 8x8 led matrix on WS2812 to display any events (I haven’t thought of any yet) and the router board itself on a removable panel. I will post the design soon and give a link here.
Updated on Nov 1. Please tell if you like the design.
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In terms of air circulation, it is much better than the original case… Could you provide 2 holes in the back (where the RJ45 ports are) for antenna pigtails? I have 10 antennas (6x WLan and 4x LTE). Could you also publish the files as DXF? I have the option of laser cutting. Only they need the templates as DXF…
It’s hard to make it with laser cutting since most components in this design have figures in all three axes.
Hm, ok. But could you provide 2 holes in the back (where the RJ45 ports are) for antenna pigtails? I have 10 antennas (6x WLan and 4x LTE).
I’ll release the step files soon, you may modify it to fit different manufacturing processes.
Go check the latest file selector.
Thank you for your work, @Stonty. Here is another idea you might be interested it. There is a problem with the stacked PCB design of the R4, which causes strong RF interference from the main board to the Wi-Fi module (check this thread). One solution would be to move the NIC away from the main board using two extension adapters like this one. I haven’t used these before, but I’m willing to check if they work.
Looking at the mezzanine add-on for the antennas in your design, there should be enough room to do so, possibly flipping the NIC upside down to keep the heatsinks ventilated. Beside the practical reasons, making the wireless part self-contained like that just seems cool to me.
I think my design could easily be adapted to your idea (just add a rectangular hole to pass the FPC cable through - this can be done with boolean operations in most software). To me, I guess the main problem with your idea is PCIe signal integrity - you may need to use a retimer or even a redriver in the extension module.
Flexible PCIe risers for PC work fine unless the length is crazy. I’ll keep your warning in mind, though.
I might add that in your design the main PCB is upside down when the mezzanine is used. That is not ideal for SFP modules and RJ-45 jacks, as the locking mechanisms end up facing down (SIM trays too). Connecting the wireless NIC with flex cables could change that too. Instead of both PCBs sitting in the middle of the air flow they could form the floor and ceiling of a wind tunnel, possibly reducing the overall height.
Actually, it’s upside down on purpose. I first tried to put it upright, but I found that the heat sink put too much pressure on the NIC card and it bent (I used a zip tie to fix the heat sink).
To be honest, I think your idea is quite great. I also considered a similar idea when I was designing at the beginning, but finally gave up because of its complexity. In addition, regarding your mention of “Flexible PCIe risers for PC work fine unless the length is crazy”, in fact, although most PCIe devices have a high tolerance for PCIe signal integrity (I have even seen applications that transmit PCIe signals through USB D+/D-), I still recommend using best practices to avoid any problems. Especially from the past history, I don’t think that BPI’s PCIe design redundancy may be sufficient.
Then it remains to be seen if the extenders work. If I end up exhausting all shielding options and the RF noise is still bad, that would be the only thing left to try.
May variant with active cooling and anti dust mesh. Fan uses own PWM generator and thermal probe to increase fan speed it just gets 12v from the board
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looks nice! what fan is that? how did you connect it? with pwm?
ID-COOLING 80mm PWM 800-3000RPM
https://aliexpress.com/item/1005006161581817.html
Fan Speed Controller with temperature sensor
https://aliexpress.com/item/1005006402816177.html
Anti dust mesh
Ive glued it to new the frame using 7000 glue
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I put it as I have it, both the bottom and top covers are perforated, which cost me a lot, 3000RPM, 12cm, 12V, 220V fan on the bottom 3000RPM, 12cm, 12V, 220V, and on the top to cool the sfp+rj45 a fan to the banana usb.
the sfp+ are just on top of the be14000 card and they can hardly have ventilation, and they get really hot if you don’t do a good ventilation yourself.
the wan input is from the 10gb internet operator that I have contracted, hence the highest temperature, it almost reaches critical, but it is high and I am not worried, I will finish lowering those 6 degrees more that it has, the output of the sf+rj45 lan is 2.5gb hence the temperature is very correct, .
Before, when I used the WAN router to provide 2.5gb of internet, the temperatures were exactly the same as the LAN, it didn’t go over 50 degrees.
The rest of the temperatures are perfect.
Aesthetically, at the moment it’s not the most suitable, but I’ll fix it later when the weather is nice.
The temperatures as they came without any ventilation were extremely high, I don’t think they did a job as they should have done.
I’m leaving my temperatures
STL and DXF files of top cover
v1) Regular Fan grill style
BPI-R4 TopCover.7z (72.9 KB)
v2) Noctua Fan grill style
BPI-R4 TopCover (Noctua Fan Grill).7z (106.1 KB)