This weekend I finally had time to proceed with the cluster. In the last week I had been busy programming the display. After I got it working with about a 150 wires I wanted to convert it to a display with a i2c backpack. That should work with just 4 wires. This took a lot of time (the first backpack I ordered was faulty but it took me quite some time to establish that…). After I ordered a new one (this time I choose not to order an Adafruit display and backpack but a (MUCH) cheaper alternative) I got it to work pretty quickly.
I wanted to get the i2c display to work on Raspian, Minibian as well as CentOS. So far it works on the first two, on CentOS not yet as there is no smbus library for Python for that OS. But I’ll keep working on that…
Today I installed my new milling machine in the milling table and had a go at finishing the casing.
At first I milled out the hole for the display. As expected this did not work out so well, the hole was bit too large. But I installed the display anyway and filled the gap with instant wood. I just hoped that when painted this would hardly be visible…
After glueing everything together and sanding the base I was pretty happy with the result!
In de back I milled two large holes for ventilation. I am sure the switch and USB hub will thank me for that!
The display is recessed into the front panel
After sanding again I painted the casing 4 times and the end result looks pretty nice. So tomorrow I can finally start the actual assembly…
Raspberry Pi Cluster 