Drilling mounting holes for a LattePanda

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I built myself a Kubernetes cluster of 3 x Raspberry Pi 4’s recently and with the price drop of the LattePanda figured I’d rebuild it with the LattePanda as the Control Plane and the Pi’s as Nodes.
The Pi’s were sitting nicely in the acrylic tower I bought from Core Electronics, and I determined that the LattePanda would just fit (just) if I drilled some extra holes in one of the acrylic plates.
Acrylic can be brittle and prone to cracking, especially where I was drilling which was ~6mm from the edge.
I managed to do it successfully by:

  1. Securing the acrylic plate (with the paper still on it) to a piece of timber
  2. Clamping the acrylic plate and wood to the bed of my drill press
  3. Setting the speed of the drill press to 120rpm
  4. Using a 2.1mm drill bit
  5. Putting a little dishwashing liquid on the drillbit before I started
  6. Very slowly drilling the hole
    I hope this helps someone else - it made perfect holes with no cracking!
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Hi Chris, Welcome to the forum :slight_smile:

Thanks for sharing your tips, it’s always good to hear a success story that may save someone some pain in the future.
Do you have a photo of the assembled tower with the modification? I’m curious to see how the stack looks all finished.

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