This is ikeacluster, my take on using an IKEA HELMER filing cabinet and turning it into a nearly silent, low power, rig for a home lab. It supports up to 10x mini-ITX motherboards, a mixture of 20x 2.5" or 3.5" hard drives and/or SSDs, all running on a single ATX power supply. Best of all, it has wheels and fits under a desk!
I first built this in 2012 and various bits have changed and expanded over time, nevertheless it's been running nonstop 24/7 for over six years now!
Over time I hope to put together a bill of materials and halfway decent construction doc here so people can build their own if they want. I'm not sure why I published this on Github instead of my own website, I guess to be trendy.
There's room for quite a bit of improvisation and loose workmanship in building this. Even if I built another one, it probably wouldn't be exactly like this one. Over on the flickrs I have a bunch of photos as this was being built and some of the design iterations I went through.
Lasers!
Cutting and drilling the acrylic "blades" for motherboards+drives is a time
consuming process. I did the originals by hand and they all had jagged edges,
but perfectly usable. I recently got my hands on a laser cutter, so I
designed a file using Lightburn to cut out the blades perfectly.
See the Files section below or go browse through the laser/ directory.
- flickr - Initial and ongoing build photos
- flickr - PSU, distribution, and fan upgrade
- Blog build commentary
- My website!
