Almost forgot to share a pic of my rebuilt rack that I won from the GL.iNET x DeskPi giveaway!
A while back at this point, I won a giveaway that /r/minilab, DeskPi, and GL.iNET were hosting here for a new 10" rack, a Comet KVM, and some other goodies! It took a little bit for everything to arrive and a little bit longer for me to actually do the migration (and then a bit longer on top of that to wonder if it was something that I felt was ready to share), but that's basically all squared away now. I've been using the rack as-is for about a week now and it's been quite nice!
I ended up reprinting my existing rack trays in black PETG to match the two powder coated trays that I also received (one mini PC mount, one standard metal tray that's hiding behind the eInk tag blanking plate), but honestly I'm not entirely sure that I like the look of the black on aluminum all too much. The other complication was that I didn't actually know what to put in the 4U of space that I wasn't actively using, which continues to vex me. I'm debating making a little mount for this 5" Raspberry Pi screen to put on that 2U blanking plate, but it feels like it's more a case of shoving stuff in for the sake of shoving stuff in. In all fairness, though, having too much space in a rack is a good problem to have.
In the future, I might see if I can laser cut some acrylic side panels or something for this to cover up the currently open-air sides, and something I was surprised to learn about the TL1 was that it actually supports RGB LED strips on the arms! I have strips set up internally but they're not yet hooked up to anything. I'm admittedly a little iffy about the strips because the cutouts in the metal for the wires were a little small, and I'm afraid that I might have pinched the cables a little. That'll be a problem for future me, though.
Hardware from top to bottom:
- Keystone patch panel from the Mod10 rack
- An old Netgear GS308v3 racked in this rack mount
- 1U vented, 2U, and 1U vented blanking plates from the Mod10
- The GL.iNET Comet Pro KVM racked in this rack mount (I've been moving this one back and forth between my mini PC and a more powerful PC I'm working with. I'm quite a fan of it)
- An HP EliteDesk 800 G3 Mini with an i5-7500T and 32GB pre-crisis RAM, racked in the DeskPi Rackmate mini PC rack shelf
- Two old hard drives, a 1TB and 2TB, racked in this rack mount (v2)
- A DeskPi RackMate T2 accessory shelf holding the guts of an old USB to SATA dock for the drives, with two Solum ST-GR29000 eInk shelf labels mounted on front using this rack mount.
All of this is racked in the DeskPi RackMate TL1 10U.