Arctic Tern bracket?

[Woof]

My Arctic Tern board arrived but doesn't have a PCIe bracket, and looking at the photos they don't appear to do so. I'm guessing others have them now, how is it supposed to hold in place securely when the mobo is vertically mounted?

[Hasturtium]

I don't have an answer for this, but I do wonder if someone's 3D printed a bracket that would work.

[Woof]

That's what I was thinking of doing. Probably not any time soon though.

[MPC7500]

Maybe Vikings has something, thum?

[Woof]

Raptor said:

"We're working up a bracket solution and will be happy to send one out free of charge to anyone that has a carrier card once it is completed."

[Woof]

Since a bracket hasn't magically arrived I made one. I'm currently waiting for the sheet metal version to be fabricated (a week or so) which if I'm happy with will document/arrange how to have more made. I'll also make the CAD files freely available, and it's 3D printable at a push.

A few things are of note:

• The Arctic Tern's connectors don't extend far enough on the board. The mini-HDMI are too far back by a few millimetres, which means the bracket design is a compromise between correct PCIe mechanics and access to the ports.
• (So I created two variants, one with this compromise, and another spec-correct but the ports blanked off.)
• The mounting hole at the top of the PCB is in a really odd place, so needs an L-shaped bracket to connect, and the bracket needs to pass over traces, so will need extra insulation.

(I've attached the work-in-progress CAD files for anyone interested, in DWG and IGES format.)

[ClassicHasClass]

Nice work. What are your plans for it?

[Woof]

No plans, I made it to scratch an itch. I wasn’t willing to balance the Arctic Tern card in a vertically mounted mobo without a bracket. I’ll post more once I have the stainless steel version in my hands.

I also wanted an excuse to try the sheet metal folding workflow in BricsCAD (like AutoCAD, better in some ways, worse in others, but importantly without the subscription licensing).

[ClassicHasClass]

No, I mean for the Arctic Tern

[Woof]

Ahh! A few plans: the most uninteresting was to simply to boot my T2 faster, the more interesting being looking at FPGA brute force implementations of some the graphics work I do. Unfortunately time ticked on, and since I couldn't just plug it in (then my T2 got gutted for another up coming project) I ran out of steam.

[Woof]

I got my metal brackets back today, photo attached. I need to test and measure to qualify it, but on a once-over it looks as expected (I have powder coated black and bead blasted stainless steel variants).

    https://wip.numfum.com/cw/2023-07-12/arctic-tern-pcie.jpeg

The micro-HDMI is the only worry, with the connectors being too far back from the bracket (and with nothing I could really do to correct it).

(The forum won't take any more uploads for me?)