Rack update…
So I made a rack and… then I took it all apart again because that’s what you are meant to do when you do this for fun. The arrival of another mini-rack, this time a 4U, with a plan to build a portable data-center for making events sent me into a rabbit hole of finishing up the previous rack which lead to…
Everything being stripped out. The small factor PC which was sitting in there with a monitor and keyboard attached? Gone. Replaced in the new build with a 2U rackable touch display and a Minisforum S100, a small PoE powerable N100 PC. It’s putting up a fight to stop it booting into Windows, but when it’s done, it’ll be a compact combo driving the main display.
Next up the mash of HDMI/KVM that brought all the machines up to that display. Gone. Replaced by 3 JetKVMs in a 3D printed rack panel. The JetKVMs are super cool and work well controlling the machines (more on that in a mo) but, oh, I would kill for them to be Power over Ethernet. PoE has changed how I built this rack out, but the JetKVMs it’d be nice to be able to power them without leaching off the controlled device’s USB ports.
Talking about the machines controlled, both were bumped up to do PoE. The Pi got a Waveshare combo Nvme/PoE hat and the Radxa X4 got bumped to 16GB and the Radxa PoE hat. The Radxa is both brilliant and terrible. Brilliant because it packs a lot of power into an Pi-side SBC, and terrible because that N100 needs to be cooled so badly - forget getting one without a heatsink.
All seems to be well within the power supply, a 8 port 1GBe PoE Ethernet switch. Yes, I also pulled the 2.5GBe switch out and put a relatively cheap switch, mainly to prove a point that this really didn’t need a lot a bandwidth.
So, those two SBCs are now remotely controlled and there’s half the rack still empty. Next up will be rehoming the Turing Pi 2.5 RK1 cluster and then we’ll start looking at adding radio services and a printer service into the beast. Plenty to do still and get neat. And I’ll keep blogging about that later….
Editory all
Always looking for something interesting in editors and especially something in a terminal based editor which can stand in for vi. Seems the current front runner here is Helix which takes the classic vi/vim modality and doubles down on it with some slick selection capabilities and a lot of modern capabilities like understanding the mouse and smart syntax highlighting. Very nice and the built in tutorials a good ice breaker. What it hasn’t done yet it break my many decades of muscle memory from vi, but there’s also some good crossover so it doesn’t feel alien.
Lora lora fun
I’ve also been getting a little bit into Lora and Meshtastic. The idea of low power radio systems meshing to create national networks is terribly compelling and the two little T-Decks make it super accessible. In the background, there’s a plan for Hack on the Common to do some LoRA fun linking up using Lora over the lovely Wimbledon Common. Just got to get that GPS working better.