The Raspberry Pi Pironman Case - There's a Status Display!

[Music] thank you hello and welcome back to learn Linux TV in today's video what we're going to do is take a look at the new Sun founder Pirate Man case which was sent into the studio by Sun founder the company that made this case and we're going to take a look at it in today's video in fact I have it right here fully assembled and ready for review and it's definitely an interesting looking case to say the least and not just interesting in appearance it has some neat features too it has a mini OLED display on the front for viewing performance stats and RGB fan and LED light strip and even an IR sensor and in this video I'm going to give it a full review more specifically what I'll do is go over all the features of this case that set it apart from others I'll show you how to assemble it and then by the end of the video I'll give you my thoughts now before we get started though I do need to give you my usual disclaimer even though Sun Founders sent this case into the studio for me to review all the thoughts and opinions in this video are my own and no one I repeat no one is allowed to screen any of my review videos before you guys get a chance to see them first I'll let you know exactly what I like about this case what I didn't like so much and by the end of this video you'll be able to make an informed decision whether or not this Pirate Man case is a good fit for your Raspberry Pi build and I'm really excited to dive in and review this product so let's do exactly that let's check out the pyrin man case from Sun founder and to get started let's take a look around the fully assembled product and also talk about its features the powered man case itself is mostly made of aluminum with transparent sides so that way you can see what's going on inside the case and that's just so cool and for some reason this reminds me how Electronics back in the mid to late 90s started to become transparent that was awesome whatever happened to that and why do they stop doing it well maybe that trend is starting to come back nowadays with the rise of RGB lighting and this case seems to be bringing that same mindset to the Raspberry Pi and through the side panel you can even see the tall cooler that the case comes with which looks like a smaller version of something that you'd normally find in a proper desktop PC and as cool as all that is we need to take a moment and talk about that status display on the front of the case because I think that's going to be the feature that really stands out the most and that display is actually a small OLED display and it will show you performance stats you know your CPU usage memory usage even your temperature so that way you could keep an eye on what your Raspberry Pi is up to and its overall health by default the display is set to timeout and power itself off to save energy but you can configure it to stay on all the time if that's what you wish that's what I did anyway if you don't decide to keep the display on all the time then you can wake the display Anytime by short pressing the power button and speaking of the power button a longer press will activate safe shutdown so that way you could power off your device without reaching for your mouse in addition on the front of the case you can see that there's an IR sensor at the lower left hand corner so for those of you that are looking for a case for a multimedia Center build this might be a contender on the back of the case we have your usual Raspberry Pi ports plus a few of the other ports extended to the back and that includes a place where you could plug in a power cord and you could also access the SD card from the back as well but we also have a port here that's labeled SSD so what's up with that well you can actually install an SSD into this case and that's a really good feature so there's definitely a lot of great things to say about this case it looks really cool and it even has a status display in the front which is awesome but when it comes to the assembly process well what's that like well in my opinion the pyramman case is one of the more tedious builds that I've put together there's quite a few parts to contend with and the overall process will take a bit of time but as long as you pay attention to the instructions in your patient then you should be fine but you know what I'm going to show you the entire assembly process right now so that way if you do purchase this case you could simply follow along with me to build yours now be sure to pay special attention to how I've installed the cables with this build because that's very important but anyway just follow along with me if you want to build yours and by the end of this section you'll have yours built and ready to go the first thing that you'll do is remove the only side panel that comes attached to the case at first and this will cause the entire thing to fall apart but as dramatic as that looks and sounds it's totally fine and part of the process anyway after disassembling the case the rest of the way you'll next grab the pyroman board which is this thing right here and you'll attach standoffs to each side of this board now pay special attention to the fact that the standoffs on one side are a different size than the other that's intentional and there's a reason for this after that you'll grab the OLED display which is this right here and you'll attach it to the Powerman board then you'll set the Powerman board aside for a moment and find the power button that the kit comes with and once you do you'll unscrew the nut behind the power button and then feed the wires and the button into the front of the case as you see right here and then using the nut that you've just removed you'll tighten the power button into place and then well the power button is now installed to the front of the case once you have that done you can start to attach the wires from the power button to the Powerman board you can pause the video as needed to compare your wiring with mine just make sure that yours matches how I have the cables on my build and you should be good to go after that you'll slide the OLED display into a small slot behind the front panel and that'll help you position the screen on the front of the case there's a sticky strip on the back of the OLED display so you'll remove the protective cover over that and then use that sticky pad to attach the screen to the front of the case just take your time here and you can always use the lip at the upper part of the groove that the screen fits into to use as a guide to make sure that you're installing it straight and then once you are sure you have it in place properly then you simply press down gently and then at that point the screen is secure on the front of the case now continuing with the next step what we'll do is install the gpio bridge next and that will require one of the included ribbon cables to connect it to the board again the footage should make it clear how to position the cables and install this so just take a look at the footage and compare it to your build and you should be just fine after that we could install the SD card bridge and that'll use yet another ribbon cable to attach it to the board as you can see here anyway with all that out of the way so far the next thing we're going to do is secure the Raspberry Pi to the pyroman board to do so you'll attach it to the standoffs that we've added to the Powerman board earlier and then to secure the Raspberry Pi you'll use you guessed it more standoffs after that what we'll do is attach both the SD card bridge and the gpio bridge to the Raspberry Pi both of these should be fairly self-explanatory the SD card bridge will go into the SD card slot of the pi and the gpio bridge will attach to the actual gpio pins of the Raspberry Pi installing the cooler is our next step at this point and what we'll do is attach the two supports to the cooler and keep in mind that orientation is very important here so be sure to attach the supports the same way that I did once you have the supports attached to the cooler then you can attach two thermal pads to the bottom of the cooler on my end I received four thermal pads inside the kit so I'll consider two of them extra but anyway it should be very obvious where these attach to one of them is literally shaped the same as the bottom of the cooler once you have the pads in place making sure to remove the plastic on both sides of the thermal pads then you'll Mount the entire cooler onto the Raspberry Pi board itself now at this point it's just a matter of tightening up everything and adding a few more things we'll grab the top panel of the case and what we're going to do is attach the light strip to that top panel and then we'll attach the top panel to the rest of the case and at this point the build is starting to look like an actual Raspberry Pi case after that you can set the case build aside for now we'll come back to it and we'll switch gears and work on the fan next what you'll do is attach the fan to one of the transparent side panels specifically you'll attach it to the side panel that has the long rectangle cutout for gpio if you're confused at all just take a look at the footage and that should point you in the right direction what you'll do is use the included screws to attach the fan to that side panel the screws will not stick out of the fan itself which is normal you'll see that the fan has Circle grooves inside of it that the nuts for the screws will fit into so what you'll do is drop a nut into one of those holes and then push one of the screws through and then well tighten it in place repeat that four times and then you'll have the fan attached to the side of the case and you're good to go on that now at this point it's just a matter of tightening up everything and adding a few more things for example there's a protective acrylic plate that's going to go over the display so what you'll do is remove the screen protector that the display comes with and then you'll place the acrylic plate over that screen there's also some grips that you can install to the bottom of the case too keep it from sliding now we are done with the assembly process but there are some software related shenanigans that we need to take care of so let's work on that next now at this point the only thing that you should need is an SD card if you don't already have one if you do have an SD card that's flashed with your Raspberry Pi operating system of choice then this step is completely met you just insert the SD card into the power command case and you're good to go if you don't already have that set up then definitely grab an SD card use the fastest one that you have available and what I recommend that you do is Flash it with raspberry pios that's what I did at least and to do so I use the Raspberry Pi imager an application that's created by Raspberry Pi for this purpose and what you'll do is select your operating system that's the first button next you'll select your SD card keeping in mind of course that this process will wipe out everything on that SD card the next thing that I recommend you do is click on the gear icon what that'll do is expose additional options and at minimum you're going to want to fill out your user account details otherwise well it's going to be hard to log in especially if you plan on using it headless SSH might be useful because we're going to be adding some additional software tweaks to this particular Raspberry Pi build so it might be a good idea to set up SSH to facilitate connecting to the pi you can set your Locale I recommend that you do that set your location and once you have everything there set up exactly the way you want then you can go ahead and click on the third button to start the process and once the process is complete then your SD card is now an operating system disk for your Raspberry Pi the first thing it's going to do is resize itself it's going to make sure that you'll have access to all of the storage on your SD card it'll reboot again and then after that we'll move on to the next step and that is to install the powered man utilities and that'll help get the screen activated the LED lighting it'll give you control of the fan it's basically something you'll definitely want to install to set that up what you'll do is open up a terminal within Raspberry Pi OS on my end I used SSH to connect to the pi basically there's a few commands that we'll need to enter to finalize the software side of things here and the first thing that we're going to do is activate the gpio pins that this case is using to do that we'll open up the slash boot slash config.txt file with Nano we'll use sudo to make sure that we have permission to edit that file and then what you'll do is scroll down to the very end of the file and then you'll paste in the code that you see right here if you'd like to copy and paste this code you could get it from the article that I'll have linked to down below but once you have that code added you'll hold Ctrl and press o and then press enter to save the file and then Ctrl X to exit out of the editor the next thing we'll do is use the get command to download the pyroman software Repository and that's the command that you see on the screen right now once you have that downloaded you'll change directory into the pirateman directory and inside there you'll run sudo python3 and then install Dot py after you press enter you'll receive a default configuration that will activate the features on this case and those features will be activated after you reboot the system for me the LED light strips were activated immediately when I ran this command but I did reboot anyway just to be on the safe side now once you are a Raspberry Pi reboots you'll have access to a pyrin man command and you could use that command to configure various things for example the LED lighting you can enable the screen to remain on all the time you can also alter the fan curve if you want to change when the fan comes on or turns itself off there are several things that you can actually configure with the pyroman command and one example I'll give you is that you can run the command that you see on the screen right now and that command what that does is that's the one that disables power saving on the display so if you wanted the display to remain on all the time well that's the command right there that you'll use to accomplish that and at this point that's about it your case is fully assembled the software is installed and it's ready for use all right so at this point I've gone over the various features of the pyroman case and I even showed you how to put it together but what are my overall thoughts about the pirateman case is this something that you should buy or is it something that you should steer clear of well what I'll do right now is go over everything that I like about the case and also some of the ways I think that this product can be improved and to start this off let's talk about what I like about this case and there's definitely a lot to love first the appearance the appearance of this case overall is just so cool it's something that you could place on your desk and it's going to look awesome in fact if you have one at the office it's probably going to be a conversation starter but seriously this is easily the best looking Raspberry Pi case that I've reviewed on this channel now the screen on the front of the case is probably my favorite feature overall being able to see how hard your CPU and memory are working is very useful it even goes as far as to show the temperature for your Raspberry Pi as well and not to be outdone it even shows you how much storage space is free which is really really cool also being able to attach an SSD to your Pi with this case is a great feature but keep in mind the SSD that you install will attach to the system via the USB bus so there might be a bit of a bottleneck depending on how fast your SSD happens to be but it still should perform better than using an SD card at least so that's something you should definitely consider doing if you want faster storage but just like with all things there are some downsides as well and I'm going to mention those right now and the first downside that I'll mention is the build process I felt that the build process was overly complicated to put together and the process overall might even frustrate some of you but then again I went through all the trial and error on my end so you won't have to you could simply watch the assembly portion of this video and you should be pretty much fine when it comes to the build process I just wish I had this video for myself when I put mine together but unfortunately time travel hasn't been invented as of yet the next downside that I'd like to mention is the fact that the display cable attaches to the side of the case I really really dislike this because having a cable dangling off a really great looking case like this at least partially ruins the aesthetic the daughter board that this kit comes with extends a few ports to the back of the case so why not HDMI I suppose if you're running yours headless for example in a home lab that this won't be much of an issue for you but I definitely wanted to mention this for those of you that do plan on connecting a display which is probably going to be the majority of you now overall I really do like this case it looks amazing it is literally the best looking Raspberry Pi case that I've ever reviewed on this channel now my major fault of this case is I hate the display cable off the side of the case itself I think that just looks so jarring when the rest of the case looks so great but if you're able to overlook that and if you don't mind a lengthy and somewhat challenging build process what you'll end up with is a great looking case I mean just look at it it's awesome it has a display on the front that gives you stats about your Raspberry Pi the LED lighting is really cool and adjustable it has an SSD slot on the bottom of the case it's a great case and I highly recommend it but again you have to be okay with a lengthy build process and the display cable off the side of the case it is what it is anyway did you like this video if you did then be sure to click that like button to let YouTube know that you like this video and also drop some comments down below and let me know what you thought of this case or this video in general I can't wait to read what you guys have to say in the meantime be sure to subscribe to learn Linux TV for the latest in Linux and I'll see you in the next video [Music] thank you [Music] [Music]

Channel: Learn Linux TV

Views: 13,288

Keywords: Linux, gnu/linux, LearnLinuxTV, Learn Linux TV, LearnLinux.TV, Learn Linux, Linux Training, Linux Tutorials, raspberry pi, raspbian, raspberry pi os, raspberry pi case, nas, oled display, m.2 sata, raspberry pi 4, raspberry pi projects, oled stats display, pi 4, cooling fan, desktop case, raspberry pi server, raspberry pi 4 setup, raspberry pi 4 model b, raspberry pi case ssd, pironman, sunfounder, cyber punk case

Id: cCk8GTz4C9o

Length: 17min 47sec (1067 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 30 2023