A case, printed by somebody else

Two boards joined by a ribbon cable, an HDMI lead and a USB lead: that is what ESP-KVM looks like on a desk, and it looks like a project rather than a device. People kept asking for a case.

Now there is one. Colin Hickey printed an enclosure for the Waveshare ESP32-P4-ETH with the C790 capture board inside, and published the model: ESP32-P4-ETH KVM Case, CC BY-NC. It holds both boards and the OTG cable to the target, and HDMI, Ethernet and that cable all come out of one side, which is what makes it tidy in a rack rather than just closed.

Two things he says about it, and both are worth repeating: the P4 board sits tight, so take care when you pull it out again, and he would like feedback on how it fits.

That makes two enclosures. jrowny, whose proof of concept this project started from, published one on MakerWorld for the original parts. And in the same discussion DaveDavenport is working on a third, in OpenSCAD, for the NANO board.

I made none of them, and that is the point. A case is the one part of an open hardware project where the person holding the boards is better placed than the person who wrote the firmware: they know which cable they route where, whether it sits in a rack or behind a monitor, and what their printer can do. The firmware side of that bargain is to keep the pinout and the connectors documented, which is in the README, where the case now is too.