Hi everyone,
Posting my mini rack build here. Its nearly all 3D printed, and uses designs built around the Maurício Pessoa aka "mauker" designs available on printables and other sites. I have my own printables collection with all the parts for my rack here. FYI the rack barces I designed are for 200mm deep racks only (I put the fusion and step files if you wnat to make them bigger or smaller) but totally worth it if you want this thing to feel solid.
The objective was to build something that I could use as a minirack for my office for playing with and/or as an offsite servre/backup (as in not with the rest of my homelab in my workshop or eventually at a family members house). I'm trying to get into self hosting files to "de-cloud" myself but realized that I'd need 3:2:1 backups for critical stuff and this was the easiest way to get the "1".
The ZimaBlade NAS and SKE UPS were conscious design choices, the Pi5 dev kit and flex switch were things I had hanging about from a different project.
So from the top down:
- SKE mini UPS 20000
- Ubiquiti Flex mini (1Gbe)
- ZimaBlade with 8GB Ram and 2x4TB SSD running trunas scale, extra 1GbE pcie card for redundancy.
- Raspberry Pi CM5 4GB with an NVME for docker containers, running RaspAP for routing/wifi hotspot and DHCP, unifi controller, portainer (planning to add more stuff over time)
All pretty standard stuff so far, the cool/tricky bit is that everything runs off the SKE UPS. The Pi and the switch are fine as they can use the onboard USB outputs available (1x USB-A and 1x USB-C).
My nemesis
The ZimaBlade on the other-hand is a pain in the ass. The documentation (and pretty much everything you can read online) would have you believe it uses a 12v3A DC power supply provided by a USB-C plug with no USB-C PD involved. The UPS has a 12v 3A female DC barrel jack output so I thought I could wrangle something.
However when I made “cursed cable” no 1 (see pictures below on the left, DC barrel jack to USB-C) I had no luck. The little USB-C voltage checker I had confirmed 12v in the correct polarity being delivered but the ZimaBlade wasn’t having it. FYI buy one of these if you are ever messing about with USB-C PD, way cheaper than making ZimaBlade or similar go Bang(tm).
Next up was an off the shelf USB-C PD to DC cable, I know these run in the “wrong direction”, but was willing to give it a shot. No luck. Back to amazon with you!
Finally I made my own DC barrel jack (5.5mm x 2.5mm) to USB C PD board cable (cursed cable no 2, see image above on the right) and SUCCESS! The board accepts 8-30v DC as an input and can put out whatever you can put in (in this case 12v 3A). Modelled a 3d printed case for it and we are done!
Happy labbing and let me know if you found any of this useful. Also if anyone from Zima is reading. UPDATE YOUR DOCS!
Hi everyone,
Posting my mini rack build here. Its nearly all 3D printed, and uses designs built around the Maurício Pessoa aka "mauker" designs available on printables and other sites. I have my own printables collection with all the parts for my rack here. FYI the rack barces I designed are for 200mm deep racks only (I put the fusion and step files if you wnat to make them bigger or smaller) but totally worth it if you want this thing to feel solid.
The objective was to build something that I could use as a minirack for my office for playing with and/or as an offsite servre/backup (as in not with the rest of my homelab in my workshop or eventually at a family members house). I'm trying to get into self hosting files to "de-cloud" myself but realized that I'd need 3:2:1 backups for critical stuff and this was the easiest way to get the "1".
The ZimaBlade NAS and SKE UPS were conscious design choices, the Pi5 dev kit and flex switch were things I had hanging about from a different project.
So from the top down:
All pretty standard stuff so far, the cool/tricky bit is that everything runs off the SKE UPS. The Pi and the switch are fine as they can use the onboard USB outputs available (1x USB-A and 1x USB-C).
My nemesis
The ZimaBlade on the other-hand is a pain in the ass. The documentation (and pretty much everything you can read online) would have you believe it uses a 12v3A DC power supply provided by a USB-C plug with no USB-C PD involved. The UPS has a 12v 3A female DC barrel jack output so I thought I could wrangle something.
However when I made “cursed cable” no 1 (see pictures below on the left, DC barrel jack to USB-C) I had no luck. The little USB-C voltage checker I had confirmed 12v in the correct polarity being delivered but the ZimaBlade wasn’t having it. FYI buy one of these if you are ever messing about with USB-C PD, way cheaper than making ZimaBlade or similar go Bang(tm).
Next up was an off the shelf USB-C PD to DC cable, I know these run in the “wrong direction”, but was willing to give it a shot. No luck. Back to amazon with you!
Finally I made my own DC barrel jack (5.5mm x 2.5mm) to USB C PD board cable (cursed cable no 2, see image above on the right) and SUCCESS! The board accepts 8-30v DC as an input and can put out whatever you can put in (in this case 12v 3A). Modelled a 3d printed case for it and we are done!
Happy labbing and let me know if you found any of this useful. Also if anyone from Zima is reading. UPDATE YOUR DOCS!