Landscape-mod for Fractal North Pi

Landscape-mod for Fractal's wonderful North Pi.

Most of my Raspberry Pi's are running headless and are connected via Ethernet (using PoE), so the original design (with the rear ports mounted upwards) resulted in Ethernet cables messily sticking out from the top of the cases.

As such I've created a design for the main-body of the North Pi with the Raspberry Pi mounted horizontally – with the rear ports sticking out from the back of the case. This gives a nice and clean look when using headless and/or PoE-powered devices.

An affordance is made for USB-powered devices (as can be seen in the rainbow-print) to run a short USB extension cable (connected to the board itself with a 90-degree angled connector) out from the back of the case. Extension cables like the one I'm using are easily found on AliExpress and the like.

An elongated version of the original acrylic side-panel can be used. I've include a model for the side-panel in which a square piece of acrylic (92 mm x 71 mm x 2 mm) can instead be mounted. As I don't own the equipment to machine acrylic to the exact dimensions required, I've simply ordered a handful of sheets cut to this exact size from an online vendor.

There's a handful of variants covering all the Raspberry Pi incarnations I had lying around:

• Black – Raspberry Pi 4 with a Waveshare PoE HAT (E) mounted
• White – Raspberry Pi 5 with a Pimoroni NVMe base and Waveshare PoE HAT (G) mounted
• Rainbow – Waveshare CM4 IO base B

Both the Raspberry Pi 5 and the CM4 have a M.2 2280 NVMe-drive mounted below them with sufficient space for a heat-sink on the drive. There's an additional mount included to mount the CM4 with its NVMe securely into the case itself.

The CM4 is using a slightly (by 7,5 mm) elongated version of the main-body as its (M.2 2280) NVMe-drive sticks out from the original (Raspberry Pi-compatible) dimensions of the base board itself.
The Raspberry Pi 5 with NVMe base has a slightly modified rear-panel (as the NVMe base sticks out a bit more than the Raspberry Pi itself). When using only a Raspberry Pi 5, the regular rear-panel fits just fine.

The IO-shields are “clicked” in place from the inside of the rear-panel outwards (such that they are slightly recessed on the inside of the rear-panel).

The provided G-code is for the Raspberry Pi 4-variant.

All STEP-files are included for ease of further modification. To construct one of the variants, start with the STEP-files in the main folder and add/replace what you find in the device-specific folders. All remaining parts can be taken from Fractal's original design.

The 3MF-files are included as a reference for model orientation, print settings, and use of supports.

To print a rainbow-variant, you'll need to print the main-body in the opposite orientation of what is shown in the 3MF-files (with the rear-panel and IO-shield properly oriented on the same build-plate).
I've subsequently printed the original front parts such that the gradient continues on the inside of the front panel (ie, printed the outside parts first, and then printed the inside part oriented upside-down).

From-the-ground-up redesign of the main-body and rear-panel to allow for the Raspberry Pi to be mounted horizontally, and to create room for mounting a HAT and/or NVMe-drive.

N.B. Started from scratch; purely based on some measurements taken from the models provided by Fractal Design.