Raspberry Pi 5 & Pimoroni NVMe Board Case

A Raspberry Pi with NVMe storage is a Raspberry Pi all grown up. No more slow SD card for booting or other disk access (unless you want it). It can boot straight from NVMe and response to all disk calls is fast. NVMe really changes up the Pi 5 and is almost trivial to set up. Highly recommended!

The Pimoroni NVMe SSD base for the Raspberry Pi 5 mounts under the Pi and not above like some others. It leaves the Pi open for various hats too but makes the stack incompatible with most other cases. This case has the connector and button features at the proper height when using the Pimoroni base with 8x brass M2.5x6mm standoffs to mount the two boards together and the assembly into the case.

The new Raspberry Pi cooler only cools the Pi chips so this design includes a 40x40x10 pocket that secures a fan using one or two M4 screws just to locate the upper corners of the fan. The extra fan assures good cooling to the NVMe stick but isn't strictly necessary. I use a 5V Noctua fan and connect it to a 5V pin and Gnd on the header. The Pi cooler works well but added cooling from the 40mm fan sure helps and especially with the NVMe board for disk-intensive stuff.

I printed the lid face down on textured PEI to get a nice look and the case box on a cool plate with glue stick. A brim seems necessary to get the box to print flat on the base and not lift the corners.

I used a small opening for the SD card since it’s not as necessary with the NVMe base and many won’t even use an SD card after first boots. You can still get to the card in the case with some tweezers if you need to.

There is now a plain lid without the Raspberry 5 NVMe design for those without an AMS. It's in the files section and not in the .3mf file.

Raspberry Pi is a trademark of Raspberry Pi Ltd. The Raspberry Pi logo is from https://www.raspberrypi.com and all logos and Raspberry Pi is owned by them. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has not endorsed and is not associated with this design.