Well, that sound you are hearing is the terminal crashing of a resolution to blog regularly. Kinda got lost in the slog of trying to restore old posts and got nowhere. And resolved to do better and then missed by a mile/month, so…. let’s catch up.
The MINIRACK thing
Thanks to that bloke Jeff Greerling, I have a rack again. It’s not my first rack; I used to have this half height 19” rack which, in the end housed little else than a cranky RAID 5 destroying NAS and the UPS for the NAS to try and reduce the destroying. But now there’s 10”racks, small, compact, and ideal for stuffing full of gear in a stylish and space saving way.
When I put the ManLab together, I made a fair bit of under desk space to housing various small PCs, a Turing Pi cluster, a Radxa X4, a Pi 5 with NVMe and all the supporting gubbins in one space. It wasn’t a space save; the low rolling table/shelves was solid enough but became inaccessible very quickly. And everything would move according to the twist on any one cable.
But I lived with it and then Jeff Geerling kicked off his MiniRack Movement and he had me at mini. There’s now a range of 10" small racks out there which seem to have their roots in audio work, but are great for packing in all sorts of hardware into a small space. Jeff is promotuing the idea as Project MINI RACK and curating relevant stuff. Already an invaluable resource.
The Journey Begins
So I went straight out and got myself a 8U Deskpi Rackmate and set to work getting as much as I could packed into it. Interesting thing abut the Deskpi racks in the UK. The 8U is £139.99 (RRP £149.99), while the 4U is £109.99, which is feels closer than the $79/$119 pricing and feel that UK pricing uplift… but then the shipping on the $119 Deskpi from source is a startling $120, as there’ll likely be VAT to add to that so, not gonna complain… no really not. Might get tariffed. But I am looking forward to seeing some more 10" racks in the market to exercise the price metrics. And yes, I do want a 4U too, to build a portable HackWimbledon data center. But back to the 8U… Let’s have a look:
Networking for pleasure
Top of the cluster, a shelf for the network switch. I’m keeping my eyes open for a switch which is 10" rackable but at the moment they don’t seem obvious. Under the switch, a patch panel for network connections. The switch sockets route to the patch panel and then out and around to the appropriate board in the rack. Eventually, I tidied up to there’s one connection inbound from the rest of the network for easier relocation, but the rest of the cable routing is ongoing.
All the Turing Pi
The Turing Pi cluster came out of it’s case and onto a mini-ITX rack mount, affording it way more ventilation and accessibility, which will be good as the boards are scheduled to be re-homed in a Turing Pi 2.5 arriving soon. Of course. I’ve lost the affordances of the case the TP2 was in, so no power button at the moment. I’ve wired one up and I have Freecad warmed up to install the power switch in its own blanking plate…
The ability to rustle up parts for the rack on a 3D printer could well be invaluable.
I SBC what you’ve done there
Then came the Radxa X4 and Pi-5 which with mad fiddling got put onto the Deskpi two-SBC rack mount. The Radxa was particularly tricky as I had this huuuuge copper heat sink on it and that kind of makes it an inversion of the Pi’s form factor. That in turn means its practically upside down in the rack, but the adapters that come with the mount which let you run the HDMI and power to the front of the board still function. The law of unintended consequences came into play though with the Radxa fan getting whiny, but with that much copper attached, I just pulled the fan cable and fingers crossed.
NUC of the above and KVM time
Still, plenty of space to fill, so one whole shelf gets to host a Minisforum PC which fits quite nicely and that’s four devices in there all pushing out HDMI. The obvious step was to top it all with a KVM switch and a load more cable routing around the box. Atop of the KVM is a natty little 1920x1200 10" panel which almost fits perfectly. I started out with a 1920x480 thin display but that kept catching me out with apps that were too tall for the thin display but only just. So I switched to the bigger panel and got the added benefit of a touch screen. Despite four machines going in, only 3 work at the moment, still trying to sort out the Turing Pi’s HDMI output, but I think that’ll wait for the rebuild too.
Everything else
A nice chunky power strip on the side, with some USB ports to power the KVM and a little Y cable hack to get enough power up to the LCD without losing the USB touchscreen element, hide the bigger power bricks down at the bottom and pop a Keychron and MX series mouse hung off the KVM and we’re…
We’re never done. I’m not fooling myself. But this is is great way to pack gear into a small space and it really scratches an itch. And it’s fun. Recommended.