Ultimate Raspberry Pi Computer Build – Water Cooled CM4 with NVMe SSD

[Music] if you've been following my channel for a while then you're probably aware that i like to do unnecessary things like build a water cooled raspberry pi cluster or this desktop version as cool as these may look they're not all that practical so today we're going to be building something that's a little bit more practical although still quite unnecessary we're going to build the ultimate water cooled raspberry pi desktop computer and try and give it all of the bells and whistles including front-facing usb ports a power button an oled stats display and an nvme ssd i'm going to be using a par compute module 4 for this build so that i can use the cm4 r0 board for a number of features which we'll get into in a bit i'm going to be adding a one terabyte nvme drive which will be attached to the power using a pci express gen 2 socket on the i o board and a pci express adapter for the unnecessary part i'm going to watercool the cm4 module using a 60 millimeter radiator and a noctua fern as well as a small cooling block and pump on the front of the case i'm going to add two usb ports a power button and an oled display let's take a look at the i o board and some of the reasons why i decided to use it over regular powerful for start all of the ports are on one side and we've got access to two full-size hdmi ports we also have a barrel jack for a 12 volt power supply and we can draft 12 volt components like the noctur fan this will also make sure that we've got enough current to power the pi and ssd which can be a problem on the par 4. the io board also has pins available for external usb ports a 12v fan connector with pwm drive and taco a full set of gpio pins and a number of other i o i'm going to be using a cm4 light module which means that it doesn't have the built-in emmc storage but we're not going to be using this anyway because we've got the nvme drive i'm using a variant with 8 gigs of ram as well as wi-fi connectivity for storage we're going to use a one terabyte crucial nvme drive which we're going to connect our pi using the m.2 pci express adapter for cooling we're going to use a 60 millimeter noctua nf a6 by 25 flx fan which i'm pairing with the 60 millimeter radiator the 120 millimeter one which i used on my previous desktop build was obviously way bigger than necessary and this is the smallest radiator that i could find we're going to use the same cooling block that i used previously as it also fits over the cm4 module to move the coolant around we're going to use a small 5 volt pump which i'm hoping i can run on 3.3 volts so that it's a bit quieter i'll need to build a small reservoir and we'll connect the components together using some flexible tubing on the front of the case i'm going to add an rtc oled display as i've done on lots of my other cases this will be used to display the rp address in some stats i'm also going to add a power button which i've chosen with an led ring lights around it which will light up when the computer is on and lastly i'm going to add two front-facing usb ports i couldn't find one with four female pins on them locally so i'm just going to cut up the splitter and put my own connectors onto each of the ports i then got to designing the case in inkscape using my previous builds as inspiration five of the sides of the case will be three millimeter matte white acrylic and the main side panel will be clear acrylic so the internals are all visible acrylic doesn't join very well at a 45 degree angle and i don't like 90 degree edges on all of the sides so i designed some corner sections in tinkercad which i'm going to 3d print these support the side panels and hold another section of matte white acrylic along the 45 degree edge as an accent piece i sketched up the rest of the case in tinkercad to get a feel for what it would look like and i made some tweaks in the design along the way so with the design done let's cut up the acrylic sides on my laser cutter [Music] [Music] [Music] now that we got the acrylic cut we can start assembling the case peel off the inside edges of each piece but i'm going to leave as much of the outside film in place as possible so that it doesn't get dirty or scratched while assembling it let's start with the white side panel and add our 3d printed corner pieces onto it so we can then glue the other four sections into place i just printed out these corner pieces in black pla on my creality ender 3v2 one of these will go into each corner and i'll then hold them in place with some black button head screws this will also allow me to remove the main side panel after it's built for maintenance so let's screw these onto our white side panel with that done i'm going to temporarily add the clear side panel just to hold the corner pieces square while we glue the other edges into place this will give the whole case a bit of rigidity to glue each of these pieces into place i'm going to just use some super glue i don't often use superglue but it works well for bonds between acrylic and pla and it's quick and easy to use in this case [Music] [Music] with the four edge pieces now glued into place we can remove the clear side panel and add the black accent pieces for this i'm going to use weld on three this is a water thin adhesive that is great for producing strong acrylic bonds that are virtually invisible you could also use super glue for this but you'll have to be a bit careful not to create white vapor marks on the black acrylic while i've got the weld on 3 out let's also glue the retaining ring on the back of our water cooling bracket this will hold the cooling block in the right place over the cm4 module let's put our cm4 module onto the arrow board and check that the bracket lines up correctly i'm going to be using some m 2.5 brass standoffs button head screws and nuts to secure it the nuts and standoffs will hold the cm4 module in place although they're mainly there to support the bracket i'm not even going to tighten them as i'll bend the cm4 module and i might break off some of the surface components i'm going to use a small thermal pad between the cooling block and the cm4 module so it looks like our bracket fits well and we should have enough room to get the tubes past the standoffs on the inlet and outlet now let's mount our i o board into the case rather than drill holes through the back of the case and then have nut stick out on the other side i've 3d printed some supports to hold each brass stand off i'll glue these onto the white side panel and these will then hold the board in place we just need to trial fit the board to get the position of each standoff i did this a couple of times to be sure before actually gluing them down but it seems to have worked well next let's mount our fan and our radiator i'm going to start by mounting the fan onto the radiator and i'll then mount the assembly into the case the holes on my radiator don't align very well with the holes in the case but we should be able to get them in for some reason the radiator seems to be a little bit narrower than it should be the black radiator against the white front panel is starting to look quite good now we've just got one final touch to add i just glued this into place using some super glue i 3d printed a rectangular housing to hold the two usb ports together we need to trim a little bit of plastic around the front of each port so the port sits flush with the front of the acrylic rather than behind the acrylic so let's do that with a craft knife we then also need to cut the other end off the cables and add some female header pins to there are only 4 pins on each but i'm going to use a 5 pin cover to match the 5 pin arrangements on the i o board so that i know which way around to plug them in now that we've got the pins on let's glue the usb ports into place i've added some leads and female pins to the power button as well this is just going to be held in place with a nut on the inside the power button has four wires two for the led ring light which can plug into any of the 3.3 volts and ground gpio opens and then the switch contacts which i'm going to use as directed in the documentation this probably means that the button won't work to shut down the part it'll only wake up once it is off but i can live with that i've also 3d printed a holder for the display which will just glue into place the display uses some 20 centimeter breadboard jumpers to plug into the gpu opens with our front panel complete we can now start making our reservoir i couldn't find anything small enough for this case size so i'm going to make up a custom one using a small clear container this is easier than trying to glue acrylic pieces together with the hopes that it might eventually be water tight i've designed and 3d printed some caps to go into each end which will also be used to mount the reservoir it just needs to be tall enough to hold the pump so we can trim down the bottle quite a bit we can then push one end of the tube onto the pump and put the pump in the reservoir and then install the two end caps with some hot glue i'm going to use a section of foam strip to stick the reservoir to the side panel to dampen any vibrations from the pump this will hopefully result in a quieter running system i'm keeping the reservoir at the top of the case so there's less risk of it overflowing and to make it easier to top up i've also run the flexible tubing on the shortest paths between the components so next we can move on to installing our nvme drive first we need to remove the metal bracket that is supplied with the adapter they give you a shorter one as well but we don't need these on this build as it's not a standard case size we can then plug our ssd into the adapter and plug our adapter into the pci express slot to finish off the case we just need to glue on the accent pieces these fit into the 3d printed corner pieces and i'll glue them in place using some super glue we're now almost finished we just need to fill up the reservoir and screw on the clear side panel i'm going to use an opaque white coolant in the system to match the white acrylic it would also be good to get some white sleeving for the cables to neaten them up a bit in the future let's peel off the protective film and see what it looks like now for the moment of truth i'm going to plug in the power and check if it works i'm running raspberry pi os bullseye on the part and i obviously have to do some additional setup to get it booting off the drive to get the display working and even just to activate the usb ports because they're disabled by default it looks like it's all working correctly now and i can use the front usb ports for basic interfaces i haven't read up too much in the documentation but i suspect that these are only usb2 ports but that's okay for just reading and writing documents to a flash drive me know what you think of the build in the comment section below is there anything you think i missed or should have done differently i was thinking of maybe bringing out the gpio pins to one of the 3d printed corner pieces perhaps one of the two at the top thanks for watching please remember to like this video if you enjoyed it and subscribe for more tech and electronics projects tutorials and reviews you

Channel: Michael Klements

Views: 235,879

Keywords: Raspberry Pi, Pi 4, CM4, Compute Module, Compute Module 4, Water Cooling, Water Cooled, Liquid Cooled, NVME, SSD, Solid State Drive, Noctua, Fan, Pi IO Board, IO Board, Stats Display, OLED Display

Id: 23xZ9HeedU0

Length: 14min 20sec (860 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 02 2022