Kurt sent in his great VESA adapter for the milled aluminum Raspberry Pi enclosure he bought from us — we are printing a couple of these for our in-house Pi units!

Thingiverse Thing 60671:

This is a VESA mount (100mm) that is meant to secure a Raspberry Pi housed in the milled aluminum enclosure from adafruit.

The raspberries enclosure is mounted to the adapter with three M3x6? mm screws. I couldn’t successfully print those, but the four M4x10mm screws needed to attach the adapter to the back of your monitor were successfully printed. This is a 100mm vesa adapter by the way.

I suggest using blue tape on the build platform. I printed directly to the plate and the model began breaking loose from the plate. I’d suggest a fairly high resolution as the nuts on the top have threads. You can print this in two pieces if you look at the .scad file. At the bottom you can change what prints. The file also includes some spacers (not printed by default) if you need them between the enclosure and the adapter (depends on how long your screws are).

So using the .scad file you could elect a low-res fast print for the flat base, then just print the nuts using a higher resolution after the base plate has finished. I just did it in one go with the settings mentioned above.

Lastly, if you look closely at the picture you’ll see an extra ‘reference’ mounting hole on the left top arm that is partly visible. It should have lined up with that screw on the aluminum case. It didn’t and I don’t know why, nevertheless I measured the offset and hardcoded a ‘slide this to the left 5mm’ fix. So when printed the pi should be a bit more centered. (and those holes aren’t needed and don’t need to be printed. But they’re hidden and will help me keep things in alignment for now.

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Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!

Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!

The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!