A Rack of All Trades

The longer a person is involved in building electronic devices or hacking on hardware, the more equipment they will acquire. The LEDs, resistors, breadboards, and wire strippers initially purchased by a hobbyist will soon turn into a mountain of development boards, mini PCs, switches, power supplies, and much, much more. Many people involved in these hobbies have a day job in technology, so they have plenty of opportunities to drool over the company’s rack mount systems that neatly house rooms full of computer equipment.

It is only natural to dream of having a similar setup at home to organize all of your equipment. Just imagine all the blinking lights of your hardware being positioned in just the right spots, and the perfect cable management system to tie it all together. But alas, racks take up a lot of space — too much for most homes — and both the racks themselves, and much of the hardware that is designed to fit into them, are quite expensive. Cash like that would be better spent on more hardware than a rack to mount it in.

There is another lesser-known option, however — the mini rack. Whereas their full-sized cousins measure 19 inches across, mini racks measure just 10 inches, making them much more appropriate for use in a home. They also cost considerably less, as does the hardware designed for them, since mini racks are generally targeted more toward non-commercial uses.

Sounds perfect, right? So how do you get started? Well, that is where the problems start to seep in. Finding these racks, and hardware compatible with them, can be a real pain. And of course you are going to want to install single board computers like Raspberry Pis in them — but how the heck are you going to do that?

Never fear, Jeff Geerling is here! Geerling has gotten into mini racks recently, and has been feeling the pain of figuring out how to source the components and make everything work together nicely. So he started Project Mini Rack to help anyone interested in building homelabs, RF/wireless rigs, or any other electronics projects into a mini rack.

The open source project has lengthy lists of appropriate mini rack systems, PDUs, UPSs, network equipment, mini PCs, disk shelves, cable management solutions, and more. Geerling has also loaded up a number of mini racks for different purposes — like computing or RF experimentation — to demonstrate how it is done. As you might expect, Geerling would never forget about Raspberry Pis. So in some of his builds he featured LabStack Mini, which is a set of rack mountable panels that make it possible to mount single board computers such as the Raspberry Pi.

Project Mini Rack may seem like the easiest way to get involved with mini racks, but there is actually another way that is even easier — winning your own mini rack that is already decked out with Raspberry Pis, network equipment, and a PDU. All you have to do to enter the contest is fill out a short form. The winner will be notified by Geerling in early February of this year.