Edward Kisiel's SBC Case Builder Will Generate Customizable Designs for Over 100 SBCs and More

Developer Edward Kisiel has announced a major new release of his SBC Case Builder, made to make the creation of custom housings for a wide variety of single-board computers as easy as possible — and, as of the new 3.0.1 release supporting over 100 boards.

"This project is about autonomous SBC case creation," Kisiel explains. "It utilizes the SBC Model Framework project to automatically generate cases based on the data for any of the current devices contained within the framework. This allows legacy, current and future SBC to have multiple cases available on day one of their inclusion in the framework. There are multiple base case designs available (shell, panel, stacked, tray, tray-sides, round, hex, snap, fitted, folded-paper and standard motherboard adapters) and each allows for customization within the design."

Brought to our attention by CNX Software, the new release — that builds on SBC Case Builder 2.0, which in turn added a graphical user interface to what had previously been a command-line tool — covers an impressive 102 target devices. These range from the whole Raspberry Pi range, including the Raspberry Pi Pico family of microcontroller boards, to the Hardkernel ODROID family, PINE64's various devices, ROCK4 and ROCK5 boards from Radxa, the Khadas VIM range, and NVIDIA's Jetson Nano, along with layouts for PC-standard motherboard layouts including ATX, mini-ITX, nano-ITX, and pico-ITX.

"All case openings are created automatically based on SBC data and the dimensions of any case design can be expanded in any axis allowing for the creation of larger cases," Kisiel explains. "If you reposition the SBC in a case, you will see I/O [Input/Output] openings created or removed appropriately based on their proximity to the case geometry. These cases might be useful for prototypes or other in house uses to quickly and easily create standard, specialized and custom SBC cases thru different case designs, customization and accessories."

Once a case has been generated and, optionally, customized, it can be produced on a 3D printer or CNC mill. "Due to the number of possibilities," Kisiel notes, no pre-compiled case STLs are included. There are a few more ideas for base cases to be worked on as well as a host of supporting accessory models that need to be created. It would also be nice to have all of the OEM [Original Equipment Manufacturer] accessories for each SBC in the library as well. I’m still looking for a better way to create accessory entries and groups, and continue to expand and verify as many SBC as possible."

SBC Case Builder 3.0.1 is available on the project's GitHub repository, where it's published under the reciprocal GNU General Public License 3; the SBC Model Framework, which hosts models of each target single-board computer, is in a separate repository under the same license.