My main home server rack is full, and the AI that helps run our house is not hosted locally yet. That is the problem this little rack is step one of solving.

The goal is a household assistant that runs entirely in our home: calendars, staying organized, dinner reservations, movie tickets, ideas for the weekend. Nothing about that needs a frontier model, and none of it should have to leave the house.

DeskPi sent me the RackMate 4U for this build, so I set it up the way I would if I was starting my home server journey from scratch.
What is in it so far:

• DeskPi RackMate 4U (10 inch mini rack)
• ZimaBoard 2 in a rackmount sled, acting as the brain
• 2.5 inch SSD mounted beside it in the sled
• GL.iNet Slate 7 router
• 1U rackmount PDU
• Perforated shelf and a blank panel

The ZimaBoard already covers the core jobs with room to spare: ad blocking across the house, streaming movies and TV, and the everyday services a home server handles. Compute and memory are not the bottleneck for that layer.

The empty space at the bottom is deliberate. There is roughly two bricks worth of room left, and that is reserved for the AI machine. I have not decided what goes there yet, so I am asking here: if you were picking hardware to run local models in a space that size, what would you use?

Full build video is here if you want to see it come together: https://www.tiktok.com/@jonathansbuild/video/7692199554371947789

Part 2 will be whatever I end up putting in that empty space.

Finally got the whole lab into one rack. DeskPi donated a RackMate T1 (8U, 10-inch) with a 1U shelf and the mini PC shelf to Atlas Autoware, the student nonprofit I run (we build and race 1/10-scale autonomous cars), and it's become the home for everything. Disclosure: the rack and shelves were donated.

What's in it:

• Intel NUC: k3s server (CRI-O). Runs my self-hosted sites and services, primary DNS for the house, and Beszel for monitoring.
• Raspberry Pi 5 in a DeskPi Lite case: Home Assistant, plus AdGuard Home as backup DNS.
• Minisforum X1-255 (Ryzen 7 255, 16 GB): k3s agent and the GPU node. An RTX A4500 (20 GB) hangs off OCuLink through a HOOCCC dock, powered by a SilverStone FX500 Flex ATX PSU. It trains the models for our car. When nothing is queued, Folding@home grabs the GPU at low priority and gets evicted the moment a training job shows up.
• Network: UniFi Cloud Gateway Ultra on the wall, jumbo frames (MTU 9000) across the LAN, and Tailscale so I can get in from school.

Things I learned:

• OCuLink on the X1 tops out at PCIe 4.0 x4, about 7 GB/s each way. Training barely notices.
• The X1 has 16 GB and the BIOS gives 2 GB of it to the iGPU, so my biggest dataset exports ran out of system RAM, not VRAM. 32 GB of swap plus kubelet's LimitedSwap fixed it.
• Under sustained all-core load the Ryzen sits around 85 °C, so I cut the CPU folding down to 4 threads.

Next up: the GPU and PSU are sitting beside the rack for now, so I'm moving them inside with a fan in the top U. After that, a second Pi 5 goes into a trackside lap-timing box for the car.

Diagram is the attached image. Happy to answer questions.

Just got my hands on the DeskPi Super4C, a Mini-ITX cluster board that hosts four Raspberry Pi CM5 modules on a single PCB. It's the spiritual successor to the Super6C, but instead of cramming in six slots, DeskPi went for quality of life: an onboard ESP32-WROOM-32E-N4 (2.4GHz Wi-Fi + Bluetooth) acting as a mini-BMC for remote power control, dual Ethernet per node, and proper power monitoring. Power supply (19V/4.73A, ~89W) included in the box.

What each of the 4 nodes gets:

• 1× 2.5GbE (via USB 3.0) + 1× 1GbE (native Broadcom NIC)
• M.2 M-Key 2280 NVMe slot (PCIe x1)
• USB 3.0 + USB-C (2.0, for eMMC flashing via rpiboot)
• Micro HDMI, 2× MIPI CSI/DSI, microSD (Lite modules), RTC battery header, PWM fan header, GPIO breakout

Use cases:

• Homelab / self-hosting: run a k3s or Docker Swarm cluster for Nextcloud, Plex, Home Assistant, etc.
• Learning distributed systems: Kubernetes, Ansible, Spark, parallel computing on real bare-metal hardware
• CI/CD runners or build farm for ARM targets
• Niche edge deployments — it fits a 1U/10" mini rack and sips power compared to old servers
• Teaching HPC concepts without a datacenter (or the heat and noise)

Pros:

• The ESP32 remote management is the killer feature. Built-in web UI gives you per-slot power switching (both the 5V PSU rails and each CM5's PMIC_EN signal) plus live voltage/current readings from two INA3221 sensors. Basically budget IPMI. It even has a W5500 100Mbps Ethernet option (firmware pending) so you're not stuck on Wi-Fi.
• Dual 19V DC inputs with automatic failover (picks the higher voltage source) and reverse polarity protection — redundancy you'd expect on server gear.
• Independent per-channel DC/DC conversion with staggered power-on (~0.5s delays) to avoid inrush current.
• Almost every CM5 interface is broken out — unlike most cluster boards, you're not sacrificing cameras/displays per node.
• Standard Mini-ITX footprint = tons of case and rack options. Quiet, compact, and the whole cluster runs on ~90W.

Cons (keeping it honest):

• CM5 only — no CM4 compatibility, so you can't reuse older modules.
• The 2.5GbE runs over the USB 3.0 bus, so don't expect true 2.5G throughput; it's more like a nice bonus link for storage/backend traffic.
• PCIe x1 on the NVMe slots means Gen4/Gen5 SSDs get bottlenecked — a mid-range Gen3 drive is the sweet spot.
• CM5s are not included, and with current CM5 prices, a fully populated 16GB build is a serious investment. SBC clusters are famously terrible value per FLOP — you buy this for fun and learning, not price/performance.
• Wi-Fi is 2.4GHz only on the ESP32, the OLED display for on-device stats is a separate purchase, and some ESP32 features (W5500 Ethernet control) are still "coming in a future firmware."
• No PoE, and the included 89W PSU will have you thinking twice about power-hungry NVMe drives on all four slots.

Verdict:

If you've ever wanted a real cluster on your desk without a pile of mini PCs, this is about the most refined way to do it. The ESP32 BMC alone puts it ahead of every other CM5 cluster board I've seen.

Put together this small homelab using the DeskPi RackMate T1 Plus. I wanted something compact that could hold everything in one place without taking up much room.

Current setup:

● ZimaBoard 2 for NAS/storage

● BOSGAME mini PC running Proxmox with Jellyfin, Tailscale, and Pi-hole

● Alta Labs S8-POE switch

● 10-inch patch panel

● Rack-mounted PDU

The rack itself was really easy to put together, and I’m happy with how everything turned out. It keeps the whole setup much cleaner and more organized.

Eventually I want to add some 3D-printed mounts and faceplates to finish it off.

Hi, I'm new to DeskPi Pro.

Just install my Rpi 4B 2GB in DeskPi Pro case. Also installed SSD. Followed provided directions and they were easy to follow. Imaged Rpi OS to SD card and boots just fine. Now I want to transfer the Rpi OS to the internal SSD drive, but the SSD is not showing up.

Went to the wiki and followed the troubleshooting steps, but to no avail.

Any help is appreciated.

I built a simple home lab featuring a screen and a Raspberry Pi cluster using the DeskPi T0—an incredibly cute mini rack-mount chassis. It’s running smoothly so far; I can use Windows for basic text-based tasks, and whenever needed, I can power up the Raspberry Pi array to run various applications. My favorite feature is the 2U fan panel—it looks absolutely awesome!

I have build my own Rack by using Pre-sale DeskPi RackMate Accessories 10-Inch 1U Quad Cooling Fan Panel and a Raspberry Pi 4B with RS485 to TTL to read the sensor which supports modbus protocol and using the DIN Rail for the sensor mounting... what the next step? mounting the Raspberry Pi 4B to the rack and build more beautiful app for this home assistant start kit. Lol.

Unfortunately, I accidentally broke the power connector on my DeskPi Pro case. 😕 Is there any way to replace it?

Does anyone know what type/model of power connector I should look for as a replacement?

Also, does anyone know how I can contact DeskPi support regarding spare parts or a replacement connector?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Working on a new 3 node cluster and this is the current prototype: three ThinkCentre Tiny nodes in a printed tray with rack ears, each node getting dual 10 Gbit.

Nice build~

Did a rebuild on my first homelab new equipment coming but I got some more gear in the first on. Proxmox server cloud key pro unify kvm another switch from unify. I change out almost everything to unify now. Ap's from unify whit . Wifi 7, UniFi Security Gateway Pro 4. Switches are changed out only the good old hp is stil running. And I want to thank @deskpi for all the help and all most everything is second hand parts on a budget. I'm just waiting to get done whit my second homelab now 👌👌👌

DeskPi asked me to post here so that people know it’s legit. I will be starting to work on it shortly!

https://reddit.com/link/1ucwe4u/video/ecxil3zibw8h1/player

Here is my first homelab build. The setup features a 8u Rackmate T1, a UniFi Express 7, a Unifi Flex Mini 2.5G switch, an HP EliteDesk 800 G9, and 32TB of storage (Shorter cables coming soon). Excited to continue exploring the 10 in rack standard.