Basic Case too hot?

[wildag]

I printed and installed the stereopi hardware into the “basic case”. I left it running over an afternoon. When I returned, I noted that the case was very hot. It didn’t cause any immediate failures but I am concerned over the long term the case will cause hardware failure.

The simple solution is to drill holes into the case after printing. I am considering modifying the case STL file to include some heat vents.

As an aside, the case does need at hole for the power cable.

[Realizator]

I printed and installed the stereopi hardware into the “basic case”. I left it running over an afternoon. When I returned, I noted that the case was very hot. It didn’t cause any immediate failures but I am concerned over the long term the case will cause hardware failure.

The worst thing you can face is a Pi "throttling" (decreasing frequency in a case of high temperature). JFYI we used case without holes in all our experiments (with CM3, not CM3+), and did not faced a throttling. With CM3+ working temperature is about 15-20 degree celsius lower.

The simple solution is to drill holes into the case after printing. I am considering modifying the case STL file to include some heat vents.

As an aside, the case does need at hole for the power cable.

Yes, we do hole for cable according to our setup, and every time it is in a different place. That's why we decided not to do a lot of additional holes.

[inzura.ai]

Hi - as per my make on thingiverse ( https://www.thingiverse.com/make:656192 ) I am writing to ask that you add a hole and mounting screws for a 40mm fan on the base of the StereoPi case. The Pi3 module gets hot and the cameras do too. As you can see in the link, I added a small fan which helps a little but the larger 40mm fan would be much better.

I have also added a hole to allow the power plug into the case - see the positioning in my make on thingiverse.

I noticed that you added the corner circles presumably to stop the corners lifting when printing. I use Cura and it has modes to add a brim automatically so I don't think you need to include them as we can add as part of the prep.

Great product and so useful to have a well fitting case - thank you to you and your team.

Richard

[Realizator]

Hi - as per my make on thingiverse ( https://www.thingiverse.com/make:656192 ) I am writing to ask that you add a hole and mounting screws for a 40mm fan on the base of the StereoPi case. The Pi3 module gets hot and the cameras do too. As you can see in the link, I added a small fan which helps a little but the larger 40mm fan would be much better.

I have also added a hole to allow the power plug into the case - see the positioning in my make on thingiverse.

I noticed that you added the corner circles presumably to stop the corners lifting when printing. I use Cura and it has modes to add a brim automatically so I don't think you need to include them as we can add as part of the prep.

Great product and so useful to have a well fitting case - thank you to you and your team.

Richard

Hi Richard,
Looks like we need to add vent holes at the bottom of our case.
As for fan fixes - we need to estimate length of the screws, otherwise screw can touch Compute Module inside. Do you have an ideas on that? Are you using screws or glue for fan fix?

JFYI, one our StereoPi users designed this "overkill" fan solution for extra-warming. Look at the attached file. Two fans on both sides.

Also I'd like to notice, that with CM3+ in comparison with CM3 we got about 20 degree celsius lower working temperatures in peak load modes.