You must have a lot of free time

So I’m a mechanical engineer by trade, but work for an aerospace fiber optic / transceiver company. So I picked up a ton of skills that would be outside the scope of a “normal” M.E. job. But I figured I could at least use my SolidWorks skills to make a custom mini rack for my in-progress homelab!

This rack is a WIP but I got the structure and rack mounts done. Just need the outer covers and do some test fitting. The nice thing is I made the model in such a way so that it’s scalable. Currently it’s 6u, 10in wide, but if I end up getting another optiplex, I can easily expand it to 7u+. I eventually plan on releasing the files on Printable.

(Soon to be) Specs (Bottom to top):

• Dell Optiplex 7050 Micro, i5-7500T, 16GB Ram, 256GB NVMe SSD, 18TB Refurb.

• Custom 3d printed keystone patch panel

• TP-Link TL-SG108PE

• 4x Pi4b with POE+ Hat and SSD1306 screen. These are in a cradle and will be “hot-swapable”

Current use: Right now I got 2 Pi4s, one running Jeff Geerling’s Internet-pi, and the other running all the “aar” platforms. I have 2 Pi 5s, so once they release the POE hat, I’ll have to make a new cradle insert to accommodate the Pi5 ports. I also have a Plex server on an old PC, and will likely be transferring it over to the Optiplex.

Future use: Role-playing as a Sysadmin. Will probably get another Optiplex and run Proxmox. I do eventually want to use self-hosted tools such as Joplin and PaperlessNX.