Hi,
I thought I’d post my latest project. I use a bunch of Raspberry Pi compute modules as servers and decided to build myself a custom blade server to host them. This is replacing a bunch of old Intel rack mount servers on my home network - it’s a lot less power hungry! It’s been through a few iterations and is now working really well. This is the server:
It’s a 2U rack mountable unit, in an off-the-shelf ABS case with some custom 3D printed parts. The server takes up to 10 of these blades:
It’s got gigabit Ethernet, USB-A and HDMI on the front and an NVMe SSD slot on the board, along with an SD card slot and a battery backed real time clock. There’s a little OLED on the front displaying information about the blade, including the name and IP address to make it easy to identify for maintenance. There’s also an RP2040 on it for management.
The blades plug in to a custom backplane which provides power and centralised management. There’s an LCD front panel providing basic tools for powering on and off blades and status information, and another compute module which acts as a management web server. It can be used to upload flash images to the blades via the backplane, and provides serial console access to the blades through the web interface.
I’ve been using this for a while now and was wondering if other folks out there are interested in it? It would be quite quick and easy for me to turn this into a product for sale if there was a market out there for it.
Please let me know any comments or suggestions you have, any feedback is appreciated!
Alastair
I would start learning Kubernetes legit just to give myself an excuse to use this, it looks so damn cool!
Are you planning to make this available at all?
Yeah, at the very least I’ll hand-build a few units with the spares I’ve got here and make those available. If there’s enough demand I’ll potentially do a full production run. I’ll open source the designs too so folks can have a proper poke about in it :-)