If you’ve spent the past 70 seconds reading the other two posts on this site, you’ll have heard i’m thinking about how to design and plan this almost pointless, yet fun, homelab experiment.
The general idea
The current thinking is that I want it to all be mounted on a single square sheet of wood that I found in a bin. It’s about 450mm x 450mm and lacquered in white already. Mounted on the plank would be:
- 1x Raspberry Pi CM4 on a special carrier board
- 1x Ubiquiti Switch Flex Mini
- 2x Raspberry Pi 8GB
- 1x Raspberry Pi 4GB
I plan on mounting the hardware using motherboard style stand-offs, a drill and a glue-gun.
Power & Network
I’d considered running all of this on PoE supplied by an upstream switch, however for now due to the USW-Mini i’ll be simply supplying USB-C power to each Pi and the Switch
using the cheapest, powerful enough multi-output USB-C power solution from Amazon as of writing.
The upstream is a 10GigE network, so just a standard RJ-45 terminated CAT6a cable coming in.
Uses and config
This is actually very much TBC. Here’s what I know so far.
- The Raspberry Pi CM4 based router will be running OpenWRT and handling site-to-site VPN + general routing goodness.
- The trio of Pi’s will be running micro-k8’s (A lightweight Kubernetes platform from Canonical) on top of Ubuntu 20.04.
- I plan to run this site (which already runs on a Pi) + probably Pi Hole, GitLab CE, A Chia Farming node, A CloudFlare Tunnel and a few other home-made bits and pieces.
Where and when
The where is the interesting part, I plan on taking this plank of wood with me whereever I want, I’m even considering powering it from the Sun and a battery, feeding it Internet via 4G on a special Pi 4 LTE hat
When is… soon, in fact, i’m buying all the bits and pieces now and as soon as I get time i’ll get it up and running. Probably bit by bit.
I’ll be keeping everything up to date and logged here with plenty of photos and failures i’m sure. I will stress up front, this serves absolutely no purpose, other than it being for fun!