 So at this point, everybody watching this video probably knows about the Raspberry Pi. And of course I do as well, and I've been using them for the better part of three years now. Started off with some really simple projects on it, grew into some different DIY and tech projects through my school, and nowadays I actually use them for more server-side stuff, hosting small web apps and powering things around my home using them. My main thing that I really enjoy using it for is using Raspberry Pi 4 for a running home bridge that allows us to connect any non-Apple home kit devices to our Apple home kit system because we do use home pods and a lot of the devices that we have in our house don't natively support home kit, but with that home bridge Raspberry Pi, we are able to connect the most of them to our home kit network. But this is the kind of system that I've had for a while where I will just have the Raspberry Pi's at random places around the house, normally where there's an ethernet outlet or a network switch. Most of them are cladded inside of our server closet which is not pretty and needs to be updated very soon, maybe a future video. But I wanted to kind of centralize them all together into one spot and we do have a server rack where we have one main server, a network switch and some more networking stuff sitting there and we have plenty of bays open and rack space on there. So I decided to search on Thingiverse to try and find myself a Raspberry Pi rack and I was actually able to find one that was pretty neat and that turned into a two week project that I figured I could actually turn into a video. So this video kind of deep dives into the printing process, the creation process and getting all the Raspberry Pi's in the server rack. At this point I only have two of my three Raspberry Pi's in there but I will kind of talk about why that is the case in this video. So with a further ado, let's get into today's video. Alrighty, so this project started off about two years ago when it came across this video by Jeff Geerling. It's a couple years old at this point but it was about him running and creating a Raspberry Pi rack using a model he found on Thingiverse. He printed the whole thing off on his 3D printer along with some couple parts from the local hardware store and honestly I thought that looked really neat especially because if you wanna find one that's pre-made on Amazon, he'll be looking at about $80 in cost and I don't really have that money to spend on a Raspberry Pi rack that most likely won't be in that rack for very long. So I decided to go the DIY route and follow along kind of with his video. Basically I kind of use his video for inspiration as to how to get started. I found that Thingiverse file just like he had used and I actually got started printing it off. The first couple prints did not go as planned. I had a lot of weird ridging on them and I ended up actually figuring that was because of the way I was printing it. I actually had flipped it because I thought that would be easier for the supports to build on. Turns out, yes it was quicker and did seem a bit better when I designed it in the slicer and ended up being awful for actually getting the trays into the mounts and eventually I just decided I'm just gonna go back to how I should have done it before and I just printed them as they were sent in the SDL file and yes, they did take a bit longer each taking about five hours and 30 minutes but each of them came out looking great and though I had a bit more work cleaning up with the supports, overall the project just went a lot smoother after that. So getting the six racks that would be going across the server rack printed took me about a day and a half of printing especially because I would run one through the night and then it would actually finish at midnight so I wasn't able to catch it and put another one on there till morning but overall it didn't take too long but those, what was it I printed first? After which I decided to get started on the actual trays that would have each guys be probably sitting on them. These each were about an hour and 30 minutes printing so I got a majority of them done in one day and these also I experimented a little bit with how I was gonna print it. My monoprice voxel, which is the 3D printer that I have does a decent job at printing but it definitely has some stringing issues especially on smaller prints like this but after a bit of tweaking I was able to find a model that I thought would work and after that printing one of those tests and actually seeing if it would slide into the tray just fine, it did so I finished up getting all the rest of those printed off. At this point we had a couple days of just waiting because we live out in the country and my family doesn't go into town that often and because of that, Menards being on the other side of town, which is the hardware store of our choice was a couple weeks away. Luckily, 4th of July was coming up and we would actually be in Annago with family and Annago had a Menards so I was able to go there before we got started with all of our celebrations and I picked up the two rods that I was gonna need to complete the project. 4th of July was amazing to spend that with our family and then once I got home I did end up getting right back to work on the project because I had everything I was gonna need at that point. So I got started, I cut the rods down to the size that they would be needing with the metal saw and once they were fitting in nicely I was able to get them all set up. Looking at them all together they actually turned out really nice. It was a very simple build and honestly the printing was the part that took the longest which I did expect because I don't have the fastest printer but I wanted it to still have that quality there. So getting them all printed off worked pretty nice. Getting them all put together put pretty nice and getting them mounted in the rack was the quickest part yet because all it took was just mounting the rack ears on it and just screwing them into the rack which was very quick in time. At this point I actually took the trays and I put two Raspberry Pi's into them. The first one was a Raspberry Pi 4 running internet Pi another open source program created by Jeff Geerling that allows you to monitor your internet uptime, internet speed 24 seven. It runs a speed test every couple of minutes so that I've been running for a couple of weeks at this point and I got that Raspberry Pi into the rack and that was easy enough. That one is actually running with USB-C power. Now the reason I bring that up is because this model is actually designed for you to be using the Raspberry Pi PoE hat. If you're wondering what PoE is I can give a simple explanation to that question but you'll probably find a better result in something like Wikipedia. To put it into simple terms, PoE is basically just a standard that allows ethernet cables which you use to transfer data from a computer to the internet going through your router first but then to the internet you can use those ethernet cables to also provide power to the device that you're connecting to in this case the Raspberry Pi. Instead of plugging your computer through an ethernet cable directly into your router you'd put a PoE switch in the middle of it. What this does is integrates power over that ethernet cable which allows it to power that end device which for me would be the Raspberry Pi. Now most devices that have PoE power would support it natively. The Raspberry Pi however uses USB-C power most of the time meaning it needs an external power supply. However using that PoE hat you can actually provide power through ethernet without having to have any other cables installed and that would allow you to take out any need for an external power supply or with Raspberry Pi's powering them by USB-C. Instead I would power them over ethernet which I am still working on trying to figure out. In my current system I don't have any PoE hats for the Raspberry Pi. I did order one and that will be arriving very soon I hope but at this point and when I was building this I didn't have any on hand. So I had to kind of mount the two Raspberry Pi's a bit further away from each other because having USB-C cable would take out one tray to the left of it meaning it kind of took down I couldn't have six in there I was probably only gonna be held like three or two. And that was okay because at this point I only have three in total because it's impossible to get Raspberry Pi's right now but because of that it was a bit of an inconvenient. When that PoE hat does come in I'm probably gonna use that on my Raspberry Pi three that I wanna put into the rack because that USB type B standard I think I think that's what it's called and I can't figure out any cable that would actually fit and plug into that as it is so that's completely usable until I get a PoE hat. So I did order myself a PoE switch and a PoE hat for that Raspberry Pi and maybe I'll make a secondary update video or sneak it into the end of this video to kind of show you how that worked but that's what most of these racks are intended to be used for. And using PoE and a Raspberry Pi is probably the best way you could ever power one because it means you're only ever gonna need one cable plugged into it because Ethernet's gonna supply the power which takes out the USB-C as well as your internet meaning you would as long as it's plugged into that network switch and connected to your network you can SSH into your server from your normal computer like I use my Mac and pretty much control the whole Linux interface that the Raspberry Pi is running all from your own computer. And again, I really should have bought some of these a while ago but I didn't have the money and I didn't know I was gonna need one until about halfway through the project. Great job me not reading the description on the thing of our listing but that's just normally. So at this point the thing the Raspberry Pi rack was in our network rack and I got one of them powered up running that internet Pi. And it worked great. I mean, again, it's nothing different with the Raspberry Pi it's just how it's mounted. And it's very efficient. I don't need to just have a double stick tape to the top of our network switch which is what I was doing before. But now it is in a nice rack perfectly safe and a lot more professional. I have room for six Raspberry Pies in this rack and once they become more available I plan to buy and fill up all six of them because there's a lot of stuff you can do with Raspberry Pies and it would be amazing to see these all up and running running some really cool open source programs and different operating systems and software which I would always hope to kind of publish and talk about here on this channel. So with all that said I think we should take a step back and kind of talk about what I learned through this but wait, wait, I do have some stuff that maybe you could use. So if you wanted to do a project like this I would totally recommend it. If you have a lot of Raspberry Pies that you're just sitting around your house it is pretty nice to have a single spot that you can put them all and having them in a network rack is really nice especially if you're starting off in your homelab journey and you don't have any server having the six Raspberry Pies just sitting there blinking away in your server rack not only looks really cool but is very effective because not only can you run like a website on each of them or a program on each of them you can get them set up running Docker containers and run multiple things at once. There's really no more power fishing computer than you can find than the Raspberry Pi. These things are amazing. And of course, once they're in stock again you'll be able to buy some more but at this point they're the best thing you can pretty much find when it comes to power efficiency. So with all that said this is a really neat project to kind of work with print off and get set up. I really enjoyed it. It was, in my mind it seemed like it took a long time but once I condensed it all into this video you can see it was actually pretty quick. Really the only thing you're gonna need to do something like this is a 3D printer in a local hardware store to pick up those parts and you can get yourself up and running a lot quicker than I did. I'd say about a week you could have this whole thing set up and get all your Raspberry Pi's in a server rack. So with all that said, I hope you guys enjoyed this video. I was testing out a little bit of a different format here but again, I hope you all enjoyed. If you did, be sure to like the video and subscribe if you'd like to see more content from me. Be sure to actually comment what you would like me to see to do next because I really like this Raspberry Pi stuff. I've been getting a lot more involved with coding with Raspberry Pi's and iOS development. If you would like to see anything under that terms, I would be happy to make some more videos like this. So with all that said, thank you all for watching. Have a great rest of your day and see y'all next time. Bye.