A look back

A long while ago, I published a few posts describing my home cluster setup. It felt like a great achievement at the time, but truth to be told, the physical layout wasn’t portable, and that caused me a lot of trouble during the last move. Disassembling and reassembling boards and the cabling isn’t what I want to spend my day on, so I thought about how to make this better?

Ideally, I’d “box” the setup up and move it around as is, but without an additional frame, the parts could bump into one another, get tangled or even break. To stabilize this construction, I decided to buy a 19” rack and place it there. In theory, it worked well, I shoved everything inside, and the problem’s gone… Well, partially gone, the boards were still running free, and bolting them to the rack shelves didn’t sound like the brightest idea ever.
With Google’s help, I found a few rack designs with ARM boards like Raspberry PI mounted to DIN rail. I decided to do the same but quickly realized that there are no 3d designs for the boards I own.

Since my CAD skills were poor at the time, I paid someone on Fiverr to design the boards for me, but that came out to be a disaster. Throughout multiple iterations, we couldn’t figure out the correct sizing or screw-holes placement. After wasting loads of PLA, I decided to upskill in FreeCAD and design the boards myself.

Here, I am sharing complete and customizable 3d designs for the ARM boards I own, available in STL, STEP, and FreeCAD formats.

Models

Final look

The rack is not finished, but the below picture should give you an idea of where this is going.

Creating software is what I love, it's what I care about, and what I strive to do better every day.

# DIN rail mount boards

A look back

Models

BeagleBone Black

HiKey LeMaker

Nvidia Jetson Nano

Parallella

Odroid U3

Odroid U3 (with screw holes)

Odroid XU4

Wandboard

Waveshare 7″ HDMI LCD (C)

Final look