Homebrew Blade Server Case - Fully printable (Mini-ITX) by WHITECOAT

Last crawled date: 3 years ago

Why?
Worked out that I could probably print my own blade server case add my own components and be in front over buying a blade server from a vendor.
Concept
Modular - The case is designed so you can stack together as many as needed, and they can be secured together to move around as one unit.
For example... I'm going to uave 2 PC's clustered and I'm probably going to have a third bay for the power supplies, and a fourth for a wi-fi router (Which should still work fine inside the case because its plastic).
Suitable for small printers - All the pieces fit in a 14cm x 14cm print bed, if you have a larger print bed you may be able to outershell a few pieces so there are less prints involved.
Easy to assemble - almost everything is held together by nilon ties (or zip ties depending on your parlance).
Takes a Mini-ITX board, which is about the smallest board you can get that still lets you fit your own CPU's, so you can still mix and match parts to get the machine you want.
There should be enough clearance on one side to fit a great honk'in fan if your CPU needs it and enough room on the otherside to fit a couple of hard disks (Initially I'm going to use USB hard disks with velcro for ease of swapping, but I'll probably deisgn a printable mount later depending on how well that works).
Rail system - An individual motherboard can be easily pulled out for maintenance without disturbing the remainder of the rack.
Modifications / Extensions
I see this as something that could easily be extended and modified to suit a number of purposes. Please feel free to modify and extend this design to suit your needs. The extensions I've made are:
2.5" HDD mounts (http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:197825)
Fan Mounts (http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:184302)
I've also created a collection to group any enhancements together. (http://www.thingiverse.com/WHITECOAT/collections/homebrew-blade-server) If anyone else does extend this design and cares to share it let me know and I'll add it to the collection.