I've had a Raspberry Pi 5 with 16GB RAM sat on a shelf of my office for the last year so I decided to do something with it. It was originally intended to be used in an enclosure I had backed on Kickstarter, but that doesn't look like it will be released, so the Pi has been gathering dust.
Rather than just using the Pi in the open on my desk I like to put them in cases or enclosures. This makes sure they don't get damaged, but can also add additional features like cooling or extra drives and ports. I have a couple of different Raspberry Pi around the house, acting as network firewalls, or media servers so I'm familiar with different cases and allowing the use of NVMe drives.
Whilst looking for a decent case I stumbled upon the new Argon Industria HMI 7C enclosure with the 7 inch Touch Display 2. This case was compatible with the Raspberry Pi 5 and I just needed to also get a Raspberry Pi touch display 2. This really appealed to me as I could have the case tucked away in a corner and wouldn't need to have another monitor for it.
In this article, I'll look at the components I purchased to build this unit, how the assembly went, as well as configuration required for the case.
Shopping List
Here's a list of the items that I bought for this project.
Argon also tell an additional NVMe drive board that fits into the HMI 7C case, so I added that to the case as well. This needed a drive as well, at additional cost.
Having the dedicated 27W USB power supply for this unit is sort of essential as the power supply needs to feed the Raspberry Pi, the NVMe drive, and the screen through a single cable.
I bought the Raspberry Pi 5 back in Feb 2025 for £114.90, and in just a year that price has jumped to £292.80. This price increase is entirely due to the current RAM price issues that every supplier is facing. This price increase doesn't just effect the Raspberry Pi, I can remember buying a similar M.2 NVMe drive a year ago and it cost just £65.
This is a total of £372 for the case and everything needed to get the most out of it. Let's look at putting everything together.
Assembly
The assembly of the HMI 7C case was pretty straightforward, even with the addition of the NVMe drive board. The case comes in two parts, with a small PCB to re-point some of the ports on the Raspberry Pi 5 to the front of the case, and that PCB is that can be seen in the bag in the image below.
Everything is fully aluminium, with metal screws, so it all feels very solid. There were, however, some left over bits from the manufacturing process that make the case look poor quality. Here's what I found under the screen, but also in a couple of other places in the case.
I shaved these off and carefully cleaned the case before putting things together, just in case they shorted anything. Not great.
The case comes with a side board that allows you to bring the mini HDMI and USB-C boards to the front of the board. The good thing about these is that the mini HDMI sockets are changed to full size HDMI. Attaching this to the Pi was pretty simple.
The HDMI and power port redirection isn't a cheap PCB, it's a high quality, thick PCB, with a black coating. A really nice board considering it just needs to pass ports to the front of the case.
The NVMe board looks equally as nice and can accept 2280, 2260, 2242 and 2230 board sizes.
The NVMe board fits into the case nicely, and a ribbon cable connects the sister board to the Pi itself. Pick the size of NVMe drive that you have insert the drive holding pin in the appropriate spot.
The screen fits into the upper half of the case quite easily and you need to connect a ribbon cable and a small power cable to the GPIO pins on the Rasbperry Pi. It's important to get the orientation of the screen power cable correct. With the USB and Ethernet ports facing towards you, the power cable must be attached vertically to the top-right of the GPIO header. This means the red 5V power cable is at the top-right of the pin block.
When putting things together you need to ensure that the ribbon cables are fully connected and that the power cable for the screen is attached to the right pins on the Raspberry Pi. You can damage the screen if you get those power connections incorrect.
You can read more about the connection and configuration of the screen on the documentation for the Touch Display 2 on the Raspberry Pi website.
The picture below shows the ribbon cables and the block of thermal putty that comes with the case. When the MHI 7C case is closed the big metal block attached to the upper half of the case sits on top of this putty, providing a decent heat sink for the Raspberry Pi.
Once all of the cables are connected you can close everything up. Be careful to make sure that the cables are tucked out of the way as you are closing things as there's chance that they will be trapped under the heat sink (don't ask me how I know this). There's a few screws to install once the two half fit together that ensure that it doesn't come apart, this also ensures that the heat sink remains in place as well.
When I put the unit together a few weeks ago the documentation on the Argon Industria site was really good. Each step of the assembly process of the HMI 7C was well explained and everything was fully illustrated.
When I sat down to write this review I thought I'd put a link to the docs, but there's a problem. Now, the official documentation for the HMI 7C is total rubbish. There are no illustrations any more, and the document is peppered with "todo" messages. Really poor quality based on what was there before and I really hope that situation gets sorted quickly. The link from The Pi Hut website just goes to a 404 page, which is also pretty terrible.
On a side note, Argon Industria, if you need any assistance with your web hosting then please let me know. You should always redirect to new pages when moving things around in your documentation site.
The original instructions with full illustrations can be seen in full on Archive.org. Please only click on that link if you need it, and also be patient as the images take a while to load.
Configuration
Once you've put everything together, there are a couple of methods you can use to get the unit setup with the Raspberry Pi OS.
You can either:
- Perform a network install by plugging in an ethernet cable and holding down
shift when turning on the Raspberry Pi. This will download and install the latest version of the Raspberry Pi OS to the NVMe drive in device. Remember that Wifi isn't supported by this mechanism so you'll need to use an ethernet cable. - Write the Raspberry Pi OS onto a USB stick and boot the unit with the stick inserted into one of the available USB ports. This will boot into the operating system on the USB stick and you can then install the OS onto the NVMe drive using the Rasbperry Pi imager program.
Assuming you are using the latest version of the Raspberry Pi OS then the screen will be detected automatically and the touch screen will be fully usable. The screen orientation and touch screen support can all be configured in the system settings quite easily.
Whilst the NVMe drive will work once everything is installed, it does need a little configuration to set up the PCIe correctly. To do this edit the config.txt file as root, running the following command.
sudo nano /boot/firmware/config.txt
Then, add the following line under either the [cm5] or [All] sections.
dtparam=pciex1_gen=3
This will set up the PCIe Gen 3 functionality.
Finally, it's probably a good idea to run the raspi-config command (again as root) in order to set the boot order of the Pi.
sudo raspi-config
Once the set the boot priority to be NVMe first, then the boot time will be just a few seconds.
Conclusion
The Argon Industria HMI 7C enclosure feels very sturdy. Putting it together was quite easy, and all of the included screws lined up perfectly with their intended wholes. I'm glad there were some decent instructions about where to put the different sizes of screw, standoffs, ribbon cables, and power cable for the screen.
The build quality is ok. As I mentioned above I needed to file down some of the moulding residue and then clean the dust to ensure there were no electrical shorts created by random bits of metal. Outside of that issue the case is well made and feels very sturdy. The included screws and cables are high quality and won't strip as soon as you use them.
All of the PCBs that are used in the case are high quality boards as well, being coated with very little flex. There are also a number of other options available for additional boards for this case, also created by Argon Industria. I went for the full size NVMe drive board, but you can also get a dual NVMe board or even an NVMe board with 1G LAN if that suits your needs. The case has sections that can be removed to make space for these extra ports, which is a nice touch.
Installing an OS was nice and simple as well, I went for the USB method as I don't have a space ethernet cable in my office.
I did have a few problems with stability when I first got everything up and running. The NVMe drive would just disappear and leave the Pi hanging without any drive; I could not figure out why that was happening though. After a few updates the problem appears to have gone away and the case has been running non-stop for weeks without any problems. I'm assuming, therefore, that this was a driver issue that appears to have been solved.
Once fully assembled and installed the case and screen create this odd looking "fat" tablet as the screen sits about 5cm from the surface of the table due to the large box for the Raspberry Pi sat underneath. I say "tablet" but there are no batteries involved here, the case must be attached either to external power or a decent external battery.
Due to the thickness of the back of the case it is possible to prop it up on one side. The unit makes for a nice little workstation when on the side, all you need is a keyboard and mouse to complete the effect.
If you do plan on using the case with a plugged in keyboard then I would recommend disabling the on screen keyboard as it can cause some irritation by popping up when not needed.
The screen is quite good and will display a resolution of 1280x720 at 60Hz. The touch capability of the display works well, but it is somewhat fiddly at the resolution I use it at. There isn't any sound at all so you'll need to use a HDMI cable to an external monitor that has speakers, or use a USB DAC to a speaker to get any sound.
The case also has a VESA mount holes on the back, so assuming you have a decently strong monitor stand you can easily mount it away from a desk. This means that it could be in an industrial application, perhaps attached to a machine. The surround of the screen also has a foam seal so it is even possible to drop this into a table or larger enclosure without having to modify the case at all.
Whilst there is no active cooling the Pi doesn't get hot in the case, the thick aluminium provides good heat transfer away from the internal components. I've been monitoring the temperature for the last few days and it's never gone above 40C, mostly hovering around the 36-38C mark. There is an option of removing the built in heat sink and installing an active cooling solution, but for my use case I don't really need it. If you plan on pushing the Raspberry Pi quite hard then that might be an option, but if you plan on using a Raspberry Pi HAT then you'll need to remove the heat sink, which means active cooling is a must.
In terms of price, I would say this is a little on the high side. With the original price of the Raspberry Pi (and the NVMe drive) the entire thing was pushing £400, with the current price of everything I bought being at least £550. This can be reduced a little by getting a lower spec Raspberry Pi 5 and perhaps a smaller NVMe drive.
Whilst I'm happy with a solid case in my office that has an integrated screen, the price is a little on the high side. The case itself is quite reasonably priced, it's just once you've bought everything else that the price adds up. How much you are willing to spend depends on how compact you want your Raspberry Pi to be.
Argon Industria also have a case for the 5'' Raspberry Pi display, which is obviously a smaller screen, but should also reduce the cost of the components a little.
I'm currently using the unit for automated backups of this site and a bunch of other code repositories, and hosting of a local website for the household. It really isn't doing much, but it is on all the time. The fact that I can have this self-contained unit sat in a corner without a large monitor or lots of cables attached is great.
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