When my old Apple Mighty mouse got gummed up, I bought an Apple Magic mouse to replace it. It wasn’t that the old mouse was completely useless, it still worked up to a point – it’s just that the scroll functionality didn’t.
The Magic Mouse is a superb device. It’s slick. It’s smooth. It’s beautifully built. In fact, even the packaging is beautifully built – and out of better quality plastics than most other
manufacturers use for their actual mice. And therein lies the problem. The shipping container is a beautiful piece of gleaming, transparent, polycarbonate. What is one supposed to do with it? Keep the mouse in it? The trouble is that the mouse doesn’t work so well in its box. Actually, it doesn’t work at all – it’s impossible to click and it utterly fails to move the cursor around. Throwing it away seems a little wasteful too. The box is lovely.
The box is also just about the right size for a Raspberry Pi. In fact, the size match is so perfect that its hard to believe that no one else has considered the Magic Mouse box to be the ideal Pi case. I Googled about a bit, and got no hits – so either I really have had an original idea, or everyone else is staying very quiet about this most cunning of cunning plans.
Needless to say, a small amount of modification is required in order to squeeze the ‘Pi into the mouse house. Quite apart from anything else it would be a useless pretty case if one couldn’t connect up the cables to the computer, and anyway the Raspberry Pi doesn’t quite fit – the headphone and composite jacks stick out a little bit too far.
Reshaping the box appropriately is a (fairly) simple task with a Dremel although, with hindsight, a few more bits might be required to do the job perfectly. As you can see, the end effect is rather nice. It’s a Raspberry Pi designed by Jonathan Ive. An Apple and Raspberry Pi.
To add the finishing touch, I installed Mac OS 7.5 with Basilisk – but, if I were you, I wouldn’t bother doing it. The Magic Mouse box makes an excellent Pi box, and one that I highly recommend, but Mac OS 7.5 is a dog, and the Raspberry Pi lacks the necessary performance to emulate even a 68030 Macintosh adequately.
Perhaps this could be a new advertising slogan for Apple – buy an Apple Magic Mouse and get a free Raspberry Pi case (some assembly required!)
Nice one!
I too kept the box from mine for the same reason – Dremel beckons, thanks for the inspiration.
Great idea! But keep in mind that the card can heat, you should make something to get some air passing in there 😉 !
It can heat, but it doesn’t heat that much – and theres a fair bit of air-flow in through the holes for USB and Ethernet. Convection cooling keeps it well within acceptable limits.
I think that if the case was smaller it might be a problem – but those mouse boxes are quite roomy.
My Pi rests on one of those MagicMouse Cases while in operation 🙂 I had the same idea before but haven’t got the time to convert it to a Magic Pi Case. Great work!
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Ah! Spam! Don’t you just love it?
I don’t know why I approved this – I suppose because it wasn’t full of weird junk advertising (amongst other things) ladies and gentlemen of negotiable affection. Weirdly amusing and slightly grovelling. I have stripped all the web links from it though – so, Materace, spamming this blog was a bit of a waste of time, wasn’t it?
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