Prusa Mk3s Raspberry Pi 4 Case

This was a pretty straight forward project. With Octoprint removing support for the raspberry pi zero. Which was the official method of seamlessly adding Wifi to the prusa Mk3s. I decided to upgrade to a raspberry pi 4 (4gb).

The Ras Pi zero technically still worked but had lackluster performance. With a startup time of around 10-15 minutes. And a remote webcam frame rate of 1 frame per 6 seconds. Plus a lag of around 18 seconds on the camera footage. It was far from a perfect solution.

My first idea was to slap together a case and to use a large Dc to Dc converter for all my 5v needs. As the Prusa uses 24v power. so I ordered a 50 watt power adapter and began designing a case.

The original designed ended up being a bit on the chunky side.

A small cable routing area was added to this design. And the Rasp Pi and Dc to Dc Converter where both mounted to a middle board to keep them secured in place.

The tolerances on this model where all within about 0.1mm. which didn’t leave a lot of room for error.

Unfortunately. This design ended up being too wide. Even after removing all the extra plastic I could. I needed to cut another 12mm off the design. in order to fit in the mounting location I had picked. So the design was scrapped for a new smaller power adapter.

In this process I looked up the power consumption of both devices I planed to run off the converter and learned I only needed under 2 amps at 5v to safely power everything. So The next design used a tiny 3amp buck converter.