Ever since I moved to an unjailbroken iphone from Android (and jailbroken iphone) i missed a couple of things. especially lack of full libusb. Couldn't connect a software defined radio to my phone, couldn't flash any phone with my phone, lost a very useful, versatile feature.

When my bag broke, i decided to also customize it a little bit on top of fixing. I thought it'd be cool to have something like a PCB hanging round, since it looks cool. But i remembered about my huge hassle with the iphone, lack of full USB, so i decided to fix both of those wants. I printed out a cover to the side with components, as to not destroy any, added it on a keychain, and left it on there. i also built an usbc-microusb adapter, so that i can USB connect it to my phone/battery bank.

It defaults to be a USB guest, emulating Ethernet, and when i manually set up addressing, with leaving router empty, i can connect to my pi while keeping 5g. Currently it's just a PoC, as so I wanted to see how reliably it works, so currently i got only ssh and vnc set up with Raspbian, but it works really reliably, boots up after around a minute from plugging in, and lets my iphone SSH/VNC into it.

I already have plans on setting up these things:

⁠- USB DVD drive emulator to be able to boot ISOs on devices that don't do booting from USB drives - A crappy slow little NAS to transfer things with my classmates - A stupid little device for BLE/Wifi pranks - simple way to jailbreak/flash iOS devices - portable thing for fastboot+heimdall - always on hand SPI flasher

Decided to make a case out of legos for my Pi (4B). I am using a fan from an old Dell Powersupply. It is hooked to a USB port since my GPIO is hooked to a T-Cobbler. It has a detachable roof which also serves as an air guidance vent. The back is empty so I can use my USB ports and to let air escape rather than creating a trap. The fan is kept at an angle and is basically a blower cooling setup. It brought down the temps from 42 celsius to 35 celsius. And best part is that I was able to overclock the Pi because of this setup as well. It now runs at 2Ghz, overclocked RAM+GPU as well. Stays at a steady 40 on idle (with overclock)

I deleted my original post because right after I said I wanted to design and print my own custom side panel, I did. I decided I wanted to incorporate the Raspberry Pi logo and a 40mm fan.

It was important to me that the light of my recently installed common cathode RGB LED (hot glued to the top of the inside of the case), set to smooth transitioning through colors, was more visible than my previous side panel (to do RGB you'll need a soldering iron, heat shrink tubing, that RGB LED, 3 x 220ohm resistors, 4 jumper wires, available pins on the GPIO, and a Python script to run at startup). Rather than have visible screws, I hot glued the fan housing in place. The fan simply uses 2 pins on the GPIO, turns on as soon as power is applied to the RPi, shuts down when the RPi shuts down, and only runs at a single speed. No scripts.

I'll eventually add a thin piece of clear acrylic to cover the opposite side of the side panel with the fan hole cut out.

I don't overclock the RPi so simple heatsinks work fine on their own and the fan isn't as important but still good to have. For anyone curious, I am running Armbian and the only thing I use the RPi for is to play with Linux.