Description
Hello all!
I wanted to share a bit of my story about how I ended up getting into 10'' labs and ultimately modeling a bunch of mounts for it.
Since the end of 2023, I have been steadily upgrading my home network and adding some home-lab stuff. The thing is, I never owned a server rack, so at first I decided to wall mount a couple of those devices to free up some precious space I didn't have. And since I have some 3D printers at home, I decided to look for some mounts or use the official ones when they existed. The first result was like the picture below:
Not too long after that, I moved to a new apartment and had to increase my network so I could reach the new rooms. This time I decided it might be a good time to add a rack, at least for the smaller devices. But then again, having 3D printing and modeling as my hobby and passion, I decided to look for 3D printable solutions and created some mounts for the things I couldn't find. Then I found this amazing 3D printable 10-inch rack project, and decided to give it a go: https://www.printables.com/model/427461-10-inch-server-rack
The first result can be seen below.
But then, I wanted to wall-mount the thing to free up more space on my desk, so I ended up designing a wall-mount for it here: https://makerworld.com/en/models/770125#profileId-705871 - This way I could have it up on my wall.
Then, I hit a problem. My rack was a bit too heavy in the front, and it started to bend. So I ended up remixing the original project and made thicker rack ears. And while I was at it, I decided to print more rails so I could expand it horizontally. Ending up with two 10-inch racks side-by-side. And this is the final result I have today:
My mini-lab consists of:
- Unifi UCG-Ultra as my main gateway.
- A Fritzbox 6660, also in a rack mount, as my main modem.
- Another Fritzbox, that's not in the rack, but serves my secondary WAN, which works as a failover and offload for IoT devices.
- An Unifi USW-Lite-8 PoE switch
- 4 Raspberry Pi 4s. Two of which are regular Pi4B, and the other two are CM4s on different carrier boards. Half of them are PoE-powered.
- A couple of SSDs plugged into the Pis, working as bootable drives.
- Two 12-port patch panels.
- A couple of brush panels.
- Two shelves, that hold the power supplies from some of the equipment, and one of them also has a brush panel below for better cable routing.
- Two fan-mounts, to keep everything nice and cool.
- A 7-inch monitor, connected to one of the Pis, displaying my internet status (courtesy of Jeff's project here).
- The 7-inch monitor can be found here: https://www.amazon.de/-/en/gp/product/B083S8Z4LQ/
- The adapter for mounting it was designed by me and can be downloaded here: https://www.printables.com/model/1002653-7-inch-touch-monitor-arm-rack-mount
All of this got me into the rabbit hole of making mounts for various devices, mostly Ubiquiti as it's the stack I have at home, but later on I started expanding to other vendors as well. All of my models can be found in the links below. I also started making 19-inch variants, and all of them are modular!
If you have any suggestions on what devices should I do a mount next, feel free to drop me a message :)
- 10-inch rack mounts: https://makerworld.com/en/collections/2928697
- 19-inch modular rack mounts: https://makerworld.com/en/collections/3016614
- Other 19-inch rack mounts: https://makerworld.com/en/collections/4148358