Monday, October 29, 2012

XCLIP - The Elegance of Mounting Your Raspberry Pi or Any PCB

Apple seems to garner a fair amount of design kudos for their products.  But there are those products that one looks at and you say "Of course, perfect".  That's what I said about the XCLIP, a printed circuit board (PCB) holder perfect for items like the Raspberry Pi.  Many boards these days either have few mounting holes, holes in awkward place, or no holes at all (to save space and cost one hopes).


The XCLIP, a design by PrototypeAsia on ThingiVerse, is a fully parametrisable four corner PCB mounting solution which can be securely mounted on any flat surface without adding more than 2 mm in thickness to the total assembly.



The XCLIP is configured using four parameters: PCB length, width, thickness and component clearance; the XCLIP configurator generates an STL file which can be 3D printed in less than 25 minutes on any 3D printer.  There are pre-generated clips for the Pi and Arduino Uno on the ThingiVerse site.

As Raspberry Pis are incorporated into designs (and for that matter Makers place circuit boards into nearly anything), this simple, inexpensive but effective solution will be one of those items like the fork (not the spork) that we just use.

Perhaps some enterprising company will stamp some XCLIPs out inexpensively until such time as we all have MakerBot 5s in our homes.

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