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
Very nice! Put your repo to public! As far as making it a commercial product goes; know what you're getting into... That would be a ton of work and investment. Nice to do as an experience maybe, I don't know if you should expect to really make money on it.
Totally understand what you mean. My background is as a freelance programmer and I have my own business doing this. I've never commercialised any hardware (though I've built plenty of stuff for my own use) so it's a bit of a leap into the dark. I don't imagine there'd be huge volumes so not expecting to make my fortune from it. I built this for my own use and now it's done I'd be happy to make it available as a small run thing.
I'll do a blog post with more design details soon and open up the design and firmware stuff on a public repo. It's all done with open source tools anyway, all the design is in KiCad as I don't do enough hardware work to justify the cost of something like Altium!