Double Sided Pi Stand

I found this at my local charity shop at £3 for the couple.
It is made of metal and it looks quite elegant so I thought:”This could be something to hack with a Pi somehow”. At first I just tested it the best way I could and came up with this

I know, I have great taste in books 🙂 But holding my fantastic book collection didn’t quite seem to be … the thing for it. So I kept thinking and started looking at my other bounty from the charity shop

There! These two things could be part of a great media centre Pi based.

An hour later and with a bit of drilling my new elegant media centre was ready!

And with the JBL speaker it also “sounds” quite well too.

I love the way OpenELEC looks with these dark tones on my metal black book holder

What do you need for this little project

Although you don’t strictly need one you better off buying yourself a iQuadio Pi DAC+ and most importantly this nice Pi-DAC+ case from ModMyPi which comes with all the necessary hardware (spacers and screws). Of course you’ll need a Pi and the official DSI touchscreen.

How do I build it

The final “product” is surprisingly versatile and it all revolves on how you take your measurements and to the drilling.

As I was taking the measurement in fact I realised that not only I could install the screen the right way around without needing to fiddle with /boot/config.txt file by adding lcd_rotate=2  if for example you are using Raspbian but I could also accommodate a 180 degrees rotate one.

Having the screen the right way up is actually more important than it sounds. In OpenELEC rotating the screen is done fairly easily from the GUI but that comes to a compromise. The screen viewing angle is best when watching it as the ribbon cable is at the bottom. Some interesting reading about this.

I required anyway two sets of four drils because I needed to be able to anchor the Pi at the back anyway. In the end I came up with this type of drilling.

You can put the screen using the red holes and use the green ones for the Pi. If for whatever reason you need the screen rotated of 180 degrees just swap and use the green ones for the screen and the red for the Pi. The screen will always be centred with the book holder.

That’s nice I guess but it also opened up to another configuration

Which transforms the whole thing into a nice workstation with the screen at the back

and the Pi on the front … or was it the other way around :))

Switching to “the other side” is fairly easy

Just swap places between the screws for the screen and the spacers for the Pi.

Wrap up

The best place I found for this though is with my trusty Hi-Fi and no, I wasn’t drunk because of the Pampero!

That’s it I guess. I hope this can inspire some of your hacking and more importantly some recycling!