As you are probably aware, today is a national holiday in the USA – Thanksgiving. We are not based in the USA, but since a lot of our customers are we thought we should mark the occasion in some way (and, to be completely honest, it fit in nicely with the completion of this little project!). For all of you who do not celebrate Thanksgiving, you can just think of this as a little gift back to the open source community from which we spawned. We are eternally grateful for the support we received in our very first Kickstarter for the Pi Supply Switch and the four Kickstarters we have run since then and we want to return the favour.

Recently the Raspberry Pi Foundation released the new and improved versions of our favourite little credit card computer – the Models A+ and B+. Whilst fundamentally the same hardware (with the BCM2835 chip at their heart) there are some pretty nifty little improvements including reduced power consumption, better mounting hole locations, extra USB ports, more GPIO pins. The Model B+ maintains the same footprint as the original Model B, despite the additional extras however the Model A+ takes a new smaller size, perfect for integrated applications.

The only real downside to the upgrade is that due to the new location of a lot of the connectors and the additional USB and GPIO, some add on board and practically every case that already existed would no longer work with the Models A+ and B+. This obviously left case designers sprawling to create new enclosure designs to keep our new plus models as safe and snug as their predecessors! To this end, we have created a laser cut acrylic case for both the Model A+ and B+ Raspberry Pis and we are releasing the design files under an open source license (Creative Commons Attribution, Share Alike) so you can all make them yourselves if you have access to a laser cutter or 3D printer.

We have released the files for both the Model A+ and Model B+ cases on our Thingiverse page, alongside all of our other releases.

If you have no interest in making one of the cases yourself or at your local hackerspace then we will shortly have these available to purchase in the shop for estimated prices of £4 for A+ and £6 for B+ but these are still TBC.

Last but not least, make sure to keep an eye on our Twitter and Facebook pages for information about our upcoming Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals over the coming days. And why not give us a Like and a Follow whilst you are there to keep up to date with all of our latest developments and projects?