This minimal “case” ensures good passive cooling of the Raspberry Pi board. It can be disposed either flat or on its side, which improves natural convection. it doesn't really covers anything, but the device can at least be manipulated easily without touching the components directly. All connectors remain accessible. This reduced overall thermal resistance by 14% in my tests, compared to a conventional case which I used previously, even though I had already remixed this case  to add a lot of openings.

The heat sink and camera mount that are visible on the pictures are independent. Here is the link for the camera mount (I can provide more details on those if needed). Another practical advantage of this cage is that the camera does not need to be disconnected to put the board in its place.

The cage consists of only the edges of a (scaled) cube, with diagonals on four faces for stiffness. The board is attached using M2.5 screw (5mm length). I split it into a bottom and top parts (plus two additional diagonal beams) to remove the need for large support structures. No supports are needed (the STL file for the full cage is provided too). You can glue the cage together and then put the board inside, since two faces of the cube are open.

Sorry I didn't take time to clean the meshes ; it doesn't seem to trouble Cura. This is designed in OpenSCAD, the box itself is customizable, but the decomposition into separate parts is not completely parametric (because of the diagonal beams).

Temperature testing

I compared the temperature obtained with my earlier case (shown on the last picture) and the new cage, running the same CPU intensive task, taking the mean of temperature measurements during on minute after stabilization. Bellow are the results in terms of temperature difference between the CPU and the room:

• case: 50°
• case, on its side: 46.5°
• case, flat without its top: 45.5
• cage, flat: 45.5°
• cage, on its side: 43°, i.e., 7° reduction (14%) w.r.t. the conventional case laying flat

The difference is quite significant (enough to bring the temperature below 80° during the CPU intensive computer vision system I'm working with), and placing the board on its side proves very effective by itself. The large cage ensures good stability in this orientation.