You have a PI. You have a DAC. You have a SSD. Now you need a place(case) to put it. Hello to LEELOO, the UNIVERSAL PI CASE.

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It all started not with a Pi, but with a problem. Where has all my music gone?

What you hold dear is scattered all over: buried in your computer, phone, tablet, or external hard drive, and always one too many steps (and another subscription charge) away. So, you don’t play it, sigh, and move on.

What if you don’t have to? What if the music you want to hear is available at ease, from all possible sources, in one single place, ready to play? Be it from your curated mp3 collection, streamed from the web, radio, or even YouTube?

PI enters the room. Wow, it can really do all this? Yes. But wait, there is no case which can house a PI and a DAC at the same time. And if you have an external SSD for large collections, it will dangle around on the side. It can’t be turned off, too. And if you like to hit play, you can’t.

Well, dear PI, now you can. All of the above. And do it in style.

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One fateful day you look at the backup drive of 55GB of your all-time favorite gems of music. Some of it will never be on a streaming service. Because it is from your high school band covering Nirvana, a rare remix vinyl, or from the mixtape you made for your first love. You start to play it from your Desktop and think "Oh this is so daft, I don't want to have to boot the computer, launch the program, and click away with the mouse a thousand times just to play a song. Feeling gone before song start.

So you tell yourself 'I still want to play these songs sometimes, let's see what is available'. You surf the web for a player and are greeted with products that cost an arm and a leg, don't have internal storage, or both. They all look quite alike, too. While the designers took great care, it is obvious they were all bound by the limits of conventional production methods.

In a wink from the universe, you come across the player software VOLUMIO OS, and find this magical thing called a DAC. And you say to yourself: I have a Raspberry Pi already, and I have several SSDs in external enclosures, too. This is EXACTLY what I need!

But, the problem remains the same. Of all the available cases, some have an SSD, but no space for a DAC. Some can fit a DAC, but not an SSD. And, they look like, well, how they look like. Not really made with a living room appeal.

So, you set out to make a case yourself. You quit your job, invest your life savings, do everything yourself (because, in true Engineer fashion), and after two years of development drop the "box with display" concept. Because the design just doesn’t work. You then change the concept to "box without display". It divides the costs by 10. It has the potential to look awesome. It can land at a great value for money price point. Happy with it, you continue.

Another two years, a marriage, and a newborn later, development is complete. Nice to meet you. My hope is that together we can make an impact. A little dent into the world of design and how products are made. And that you put the LEELOO next to your TV, marvel, and enjoy your music. Coming to you from LOVEANDFURY, Timo