C4Labs Zebra PoE + Case Kit for Raspberry Pi 4B or 3B+ and PoE+ HAT or Official PoE Hat - Black Ice

Fair warning, it is basically a puzzle disguised as a pi case. While the number of peices are intimidating, fear not! The instructions are very well designed. It's important to look carefully at the diagram because some peices have subtle differences. Once you follow the instructions, you are golden. The resulting case is sturdy, fits perfectly, and is beautiful.This is very different than those cheap plastic cases where the tolerances are sloppy. It fits like a glove and is very well the thought out. It vents, it protects and looks great doing it.I will definitely be buying more from this maker.

Cool case, no mount for a fan.

I had some challenges assembling this until I figured out you don't use the stock screws and spacers to attach the PoE hat to the board. You pop the board in the case, add a case layer to the stack and then attach the PoE hat to the board pins only. The Ikea style instructions do not mention this but are otherwise quite decent.The case was designed with very tight tolerances so fitting everything together requires gentle cajoling but the finished case fits together nicely is quite satisfying in appearance, heft and feel. The port holes line up well. The Pi and the hat are held very securely with no movement or rattling. The overall experience was more fun than frustrating for me.The case has limited flow-through ventilation so the fan was kicking in on high speed often and annoyingly noisy out of the box. The default fan settings are pretty aggressive and try to keep the CPU at <50 degrees.Adding the lines below to /boot/config.txt fixed the issue nicely while not running the CPU too hot.# PoE Hat Fan Speed Controldtoverlay=rpi-poedtparam=poe_fan_temp0=57000dtparam=poe_fan_temp1=60000dtparam=poe_fan_temp2=63000dtparam=poe_fan_temp3=66000The high speed fan only kicks on under unusually high loads now.I'm very satisfied with this case and will probably be getting another.

I bought this for a Pi 3B+. There are two issues of great concern.First, while I appreciate the nicely illustrated instructions, it was still very difficult to assemble. One of the pieces broke from being misaligned when trying to get it in place on the screw and I was unaware until I disassembled it. There are too many layers to this construction. This needs to be a lot fewer pieces. Don't get me started on the screws...Second, there is no ventilation. All four sides of the Pi are closed off by the acrylic so the only path for heat to escape is between the USB and Ethernet ports. I even tried removing the shield surrounding the HDMI and power ports. In both cases, the fan had to run at full speed to maintain 50 degrees Celsius, and that was with the CPU dialed back to its lowest operating frequency of 600 MHz...idle.. It normally runs at 1.4 GHz.In order for this to be satisfactory, there needs to be adequate ventilation on all sides, ideally a honeycomb pattern all around so that everything can breathe. And it needs to be much easier to assemble. A case shouldn't be more than 5 pieces in my opinion. As a bonus, consider redesigning around the screw set that comes with the official PoE+ HAT.

I needed some cases for some Raspberry Pi 3B+ & 4B boards for dual-redundant PiHole units that I was building for my home and small office. The trick with my project was that I didn't want to use an external PSU for the RPIs, I wanted to use PoE instead. I bought a handful of official PoE hats and an equal number of cases from another manufacturer who claimed compatibility with the official PoE hat. Long story short, the PoE hat wouldn't fit inside the case.I discovered this case and decided to give it a go. I have nothing but positive things to say about these. The instructions were clear and straight forward, and the assembled case feels solid. I also appreciate the extra slack in the top that this case provides. I'd imagine that you could other hats inside instead of the official PoE board, if you were so inclined. This will be my go-to case for future Raspberry builds.

The kit comes in many pieces. For someone that has a hard time with his hands, this proved to be troublesome.It came on time and as far as I can tell, complete.

Unfortunately, this case has many issues, I wanted a case that would work well with a Pi4 with top hat.1. Mainboard didn't quite fit into the first piece of the case.2. The way the pieces go together you put the TopHat on mid-assembly and due to how the pieces fit together it forces quite a gap between the tophat and main board (I'm actually surprised the board booted).3. Top 2 layers of the case will not fit onto my TopHat as it was not designed for a tophat as big as mine apparently.4. Micro-hdmi cable can't fit after the case is on (first real blocker)

I like that it's cut from sheets of acrylic instead of injection molded. I was skeptical of how sturdy it'd be and wasn't looking forward to peeling the protective paper off the plastic but neither ended up being any issue at all.The Pi and hat are held firmly in place by the case itself. The only screws used are the four corner case screws which are included.This will be in a warm environment during summer (garage) so we'll see how good the ventilation is. I suppose it mostly depends on how much air the PoE hat fan can move and how fast. If it doesn't pan out for this application, I'll be using it elsewhere for sure. I like the case and have other Pis I can use it with.The only wish I'd have for a wish list is some option for including an SSD drive in the configuration, as shown in the pic. I'll probably print some sort of bracket to get the job done but it'd be nice if it were part of the case design.