Taking inspiration from the case for my networked USB drive, I designed a case for my ESP32-S2 TFT Feather DNS proxying ad blocker.
If you have any use for this, the annotated file for cutting the case is on my blog:
There is also a ~1 minute assembly video:
This has to be the closet to a perfect case for a postage stamp sized microcontroller I have seen. Everything needed and nothing else.
That’s cool but unfortunately it left out the two most important details to me: what kind of performance do you get out of it (it’s just a local network dns call so I bet it’s fast?) and how’d you make those little feet?
Yes,how did you make the feet?
You have elevated hardware to art. Congratulations!
edit: I didn’t realize that was a pun at first…
and @evansd2 My guess is circles cut out of black foam core board.
I have been using it with my iPad for reading RSS feeds. I am not noticing any extra latency with it. It might be different with a sufficient number of concurrent users.
Edit: I am running a caching DNS proxy on my network already anyway. I rarely see any lookup latency.
It got to about 2 weeks of up time and 18k requests blocked before a power interruption due to rebooting the computer to which it is currently connected. So, seems to be pretty stable.
With this board, the block list has a limit of about 64k entries. That might not be enough, depending on what you want to do with it.
It is an interesting exploration of a portable solution. You can run something similar on a Raspberry Pi or similar single-board computer (“PiHole”) and, that might be a more robust network appliance.
The feet are 6mm HD EVA foam. They are slightly longer than the screws extending out the bottom. I made the hole in the EVA foam smaller than the diameter of the screws (2mm screws, 1mm holes) so that they grip the screws well. (/cc @markevans36301)
How does this compare to pihole?
I like the feet a lot. Thanks for the idea!
Off to find some 6mm HD EVA foam for next time I need feet…
You can get variants with a lot more memory…
It is doing the same thing as a PiHole. It has less processing power and, possibly less memory, depending on the specific board.
It is a little less expensive than a Raspberry Pi.
It is physically quite a bit smaller than a Pi.
This also has a much cooler case than a typical Raspberry Pi. 
A little? Rpi go for what 35$+ without a display? The feather tft is $25… but adafruit is generally overpriced.
You can get a unit with 4x more flash and PSRAM from Banggood for half that:
You could go even cheaper, esp32s without built in displays are about a buck… (have to do a little shopping for one with enough memory)
https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256806150650156.html
You can add a display for about $2.50:
https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256807047162618.html
Or go much smaller with similar specs for under $6 all in:
Heh not sure why the preview is in German but anyway.
I love adafruit but they’re definitely a bit expensive.
Very nice! Is there any heat build up being enclosed like that?
It reads as about 15-17ÂşF warmer than surrounding non-electronic surfaces, about the same as the case for a running Raspberry Pi in the same room. 96-98Âş should be well within the operating temperature for that board.
