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froqstar

Project is done :)
The goal was to have a nice "living room capable" 10" rack to hold my box with a touch display for smart home control, a network switch and a UPS.
And no it is not living in the livingroom now, nor was it planned ;) I could have moved the network wiring to the back/inside, but in the end it needed a little nerd factor.

Mostly made from laser cut plywood in pattern that I spray painted black, and some 3D printed parts. All self designed/built except for the metal rails in the corners.
And did I mention it's ALL powered by USB-C PD internally? 😍

...and the touch display worked with the Pi out of the box, running touchkio software to offer a nice homeassistant touch kiosk experience.

The Pi3 is struggling with it though, the interface feels quite sluggish and for some reason history graphs don't work in dark mode.

Ah yes and the live camera feed of my driveway is intentionally down because there is construction going on.

@froqstar Very nice. They are great little machines to homelab with. I've used them at work for clients too.

@kn4ntu thanks, yes and they come in all power and budget sizes :) If you don't need GPIO I prefer them to Raspberry PIs

@froqstar that is very neat, great work!

@froqstar looks great!
What did you use for a UPS? Does that fit in the rack as well?

@moostveen yes it's the bottom 1u unit and self built.
It consists of an AC to 24V DC converter that connects a 4in1 DC to USB-C PD board and a 6S LiIon battery in parallel, so super barebones design without any smarts or switchover but also super cheap.
The nice thing about 24V is that it holds the LiIon cells at 4V per cell instead of full which prolongs their lifespan and gives the PD converter plenty of headroom to put out 20V and below.
Make sure to use a BMS which balances the cells also when not fully charged, as most cheap ones only balance at full charge which as mentioned is avoided by design.

It works and should give the rack 3 hours of backup power with the installed capacity (6s2p 18650 LiIon), but not sure whether I would recommend others to do the same.

@froqstar indeed, not for the faint of heart 🤣

I’ve been looking forever for something pre-made that would fit a 10” rack but that seems non-existent so got all excited😂
I guess I’ll have to brush up my on my soldering skills then!