Saturn 6: Rocket inspired minilab
This is Saturn 6: a compact 10” minilab that hosts 5xRaspberry Pi's and an ARM based NAS. It's a homage to the Saturn V rocket, my Mercury One 3D printer and space exploration in general.
About the build:
The chassis is made from 2020 T-slot extrusions I cut up, almost everything else is 3D printed. This is a 100% DYI project, you cant buy this.
Hardware
On the top panel sits a Unifi Access point
| U | Device |
|---|---|
| 8 | Unifi USG |
| 7 | Managed 2.5Gb PoE switch with 10G SFP+ - MokerLink |
| 6 | Patch Panel |
| 5 | Managed 2.5Gb PoE switch with 10G SFP+ - MokerLink |
| 4 | 5x Raspberry Pi 5's (8Gb), Waveshare PoE + NVMe hats |
| 3 | "" |
| 2 | NAS - Its a CM3588 with 16Gb RAM running OMV with 4xCrucial 4Tb NVMe's in RAIDZ1 (10Tb usable space) |
| 1 | Blank - room for n100 or itx based machine if required in future. |
Design philosophies:
- Portable: Designed for moving house, must be able to be unplugged and setup at a new location in minutes. Handles have been added for easy transport. Ethernet cables can be quickly detached using the rear patch panel.
- White Rack: After years of dealing with black racks, black cables, and black servers—and not being able to see anything—I wanted something different. White racks make everything so much easier to see and work with
- All in one: A power and a single internet cable are the only connections needed to be fully operational. Power bricks and the ISP router can be attached to the DIN rail below.
- Labeling: Everything must be labeled, cables and compute etc. No more guessing what cable is what, what Pi is what etc..
- Flexible: It handles standard home services while remaining versatile for lab experiments (Slurm, DBs, Kubernetes, Ansible... anything I feel like testing). I split the switches—one for home and one for lab—so I can power off or reconfigure the lab switch without affecting the rest of the house.
- Accessible: Fast and tool less access to the hardware. Its no good if it's a pain to open up and work on. Panels can be removed with latches in seconds. Thanks team Voron
- Power efficient. My compute needs are light, but it needs to be flexible for experimentation. Currently at ~80w including the highly inefficient Xfinity router and powering 3xUnifi AP's over PoE. I can reduce this by powering off the rack AP and a few of the Pi's when not in use to about 60w
3D files:
For those interested, I’ve uploaded the 3D files to a GitHub repo. Most of the chassis components are remixes, but the faceplates, panels, and skirts are my own design.
A few notes:
- The files were created in Tinkercad, so only STL files are available (no STEP files, sorry!).
- I consider this an alpha release—it works for me, but tolerances could be tighter, and some parts could be designed more efficiently.
Want to know more? Ask in the comments. I hope you enjoy, I had a lot of fun building this one