Today I did just a bit of fabrication 🙂

Fab work is always ‘interesting’, given the garage is full, so all work gets done out in the carport.  Which means lugging whatever tools I need outside as I need them.  Today we’re cutting up the Pi carriers, as well as starting on the framework that the Pi’s will actually sit in.

The carriers worked out pretty well.  Looks like I’ll get three rows of Pi’s in the case!  NICE.

And then starting on the framing.  More on that next weekend!

Started work on mounting the Pi’s.  Biggest hassle was working out how to supply power, in a way that still makes them nice and modular incase I have a dead pi once it’s sitting in the DC.  Can’t very well power off 40 Pi’s to replace one..

I had considered using a bunch of RC power connectors to plug the carrier boards for the Pi’s in. But it ended up being FAR too difficult.   Decided to go with the tried and true method of a power cable 😉  It’s going to mean a LOT of ribbon cable though!

Tomorrow, I hope to have the whole carrier framing sorted!

Guess what arrived??   Wooo, lots of Pi’s!!!

I also bought a couple of Mega’s.  That way I have more pins available to drive circuitry plus ethernet, etc.

NICE!

Managed to sort out a REST API that works nicely 🙂

Some parts arrived today!

Looking to see about switching power to some Pi’s via some kind of web-usable API.  I’m using 74HC255’s to drive the relays – Arudino writes 8-bits at a time into them.  And then 74HC244’s to read the current state of the latches so that the PI’s will cleanly survive an arduino reboot..   Once that’s sorted, I can build a management API that something like WHMCS can talk to 😉

Managed to get an Arduino talking to it, but not quite correctly.  Must have fudged something. Will look at it again later 🙂