Design

Any design starts from sketches and finishes with ready-to-use schemes and diagrams. The sketches for the Peppy wooden case can be found in the sketches chapter. Below are the requirements which I tried to accomplish in design process.

• Expose natural wood grain and color as much as possible. This is mostly aesthetic requirement. That means that no die or paint should be applied during finishing process. That would hide the natural beauty of the wood. Also wood boards should be placed in such a way that wood grain would be visible as much as possible.

• Keep the case weight in the reasonable range. Even though I was using 1/4" boards after gluing them together the pieces transformed into the real solid wood which is pretty heavy. To reduce the weight of the wooden case I tried to make the design as slim as possible without any extra embellishments which would unnecessary add redundant weight. The case walls I tried to keep as thin as possible though that shouldn't compromise the strength of the case.

• Provide ventilation holes for the passive ventilation to cool electronic components. Raspberry Pi 3 and Amp+ are pretty efficient electronic devices and don't need any active ventilation system like fan. Though they still produce some heat and some passive air flow should be provided by means of holes in the wooden case. The rubber feet attached to the case should provide the gap between the case and the surface where it stands for intake airflow.

• Make acceptable acoustics. It's difficult to create good sound system in such a small space as boombox. To achieve acceptable sound I tried to make speaker space insulated from the rest of the player. So speakers are placed in almost sealed space. There is just a small hole for connection wires. On the back side of that tube I placed the passive radiators.

• Make the case easy to assemble. If you have any experience in woodworking you are probably familiar with woodworking joinery. That's the whole science in its own. I decided to simplify the joints between wood components in my wooden case. For that I used the simplest type of joint - the joint by means of wooden pins. Even those pins could be avoided and pieces could be just glued to each other but that allowed me to assemble/disassemble the whole case before it was glued. The whole case consists of just seven pieces.

• Make it transportable. I didn't plan to move the player from one place to another very often. This is not completely portable system. It still needs main power from the wall outlet. Therefore I didn't plan any handle on the case. Though it should be possible to easily lift the case and move it to another place preferably by one man ;) To achieve this goal the case should not be too heavy and it should have some holes to grab it.

As a result of all these considerations and sketching I prepared vector images in the Adobe Illustrator. Those images depicted all wooden pieces as well as acrylic glass front and back panels in real scale. Then I printed them out on pages of letter size paper. Those pages were glued together to make the real size drawings. The drawings were transferred from paper to the wood boards by means of carbon paper.

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