RPi High Quality Camera Housing!

Hey there, wonderful people!

I think I spent longer turning this camera around in my hands and staring at it than I did actually implementing the housing.  There was a lot of frowning and visualising how things might go together, which is how a lot of these things start.

The approach I'd taken with the other Raspberry Pi cameras simply wasn't going to work for this one, because I wanted the housing to fit around the board without requiring the lens to be removed, and the lens could potentially be wider than the board itself!  Eventually, the frowning gave way to actual designing, and here's where things ended up!

The tripod mount and bottom of the board fits into the base, and then the sides fold up and enclose the whole thing.  A screw cap on the back keeps it all together, and properly aligned.    The sides incorporate a groove for the board to fit, as well as providing a cavity to enclose the screws and other hardware that protrude from the back of the board, so that it all looks nice and neat!

Now, this design is geared specifically towards the lens pictured, which is fairly heavy.  So, the connector is positioned forward of the board, to try to keep things balanced.  This would of course get in the way of a wider lens, but it wouldn't be too tricky to simply rearrange things so that the connector was at the back instead - it would just be a matter of making sure that the ribbon cable still had a clear path to run through after it exits the board.  If anyone's using a wider lens (in physical dimensions, not focal length!)  and thinks this would be useful, let me know :)

Printing Tips

The ring prints flat side down, and the housing prints base-down and folded open, like so:

As always, you'll want to make sure your bottom layer is nice and tidy, and you'll want to watch out for any print issues like stringing that might bind moving parts together! 

File Location

You'll find the files for this under the folder under the 813 Sentinel Pi Case folder, in a sub-folder named  HQ Camera Housing.  Note that just the housing and back ring are in that sub-folder; you'll want to grab the bolt models from the main folder.

Final Thoughts

 The camera turns out to be pretty cool, too - certainly an improvement on the classic low-resolution version.  I've currently got mine making time lapses of prints :) 

Anyway - This is the last of the RPi camera housings that were on my to-do list!  I still intend to put together some other accessories to go with all the camera housings, such as a) a stand, and b) a clamp, as well as providing some means of attaching the camera housings to the Breezy case...

After that, who knows!  I'd love to make a more generic, modular case that can work for more things, but we'll have to see how that fits in with other things that are on the way...

Have fun!

xoxo

Sven.