This NHPR episode 2007-1204 entitled, using a DIN rail to mount a Raspberry Pi.
It is posted by name Moris and in about 9 minutes long, and Carina next visit flag.
The server is.
I created DIN rail fitting for attaching my RPI-3B plus and the SSD disc.
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Hello everybody, welcome to HAKA Public Radio, this is Dave Moris.
Today I want to do a brief show about setting up a Raspberry Pi, I've got a Raspberry Pi 3B plus,
which I want to use as a server, and I'm looking for a better way of setting it up,
because I want to put an SSD on it.
It would be quite nice to stack the one on top of the other in some sort of way,
but I came across the concept of using a DIN rail, DIN rail,
and I thought I would see what could be done in that regard.
So this is just talking about the investigations that I went through,
and what I came up with is a bunch of photos in these notes and long notes,
to give you some idea of what I'm talking about.
So if you've never come across it, there's so-called DIN, a DIN, which is one of the European standards,
do-it-shows industry, normal or something, but it's a standard for a particular type of rail.
I think there's maybe three different types.
It's a metal rail, which you can fix to, to various surfaces or whatever.
The idea for it is that you can mount usually bits of electrical equipment onto it,
which you then put into an equipment rack, and use what I've purpose-so.
You might find them in buildings controlling the power to the building or phone systems, I think,
and you can see them in factories and that's how thing where a machine is controlled by equipment.
Sitting on a DIN rail. You'll find, if you realize what they are, you'll see them everywhere.
I certainly have. I think I've got some in my house, which are holding circuit records for my electrical
system. Anyway, there's a Wikipedia article that talks a lot about it, and I've put a link to it
in the notes. Now a number of people in the maker community have made use of these DIN rails,
and there's a number of designs for stands that can be 3D printed.
So that was the route I went to. There are also designs for mounts that you could put onto the rail,
so you can hold a Raspberry Pi and disks and various other things. A lot of things you could fit
onto a DIN rail. It's not hugely difficult to come up with your own designs, I think.
Though I haven't done that. So I just wanted to tell you about making the bits to
set up a DIN rail, put the Raspberry Pi and a disk on it, had the help of my son,
and just go over and do both very heavily into the 3D printing stuff. I had it did a show
a while ago about the 3D printer that I bought during 2018. So there are three different designs
of DIN rail, but the commonest one that you mostly see is called the top hat design,
because from side view it looks like it's got the shape of a hat. There's one with a depth of
7.5 millimeters and the other is 15 millimeters. I think the one that's most commonly available is
a 7.5 millimeter. And I went looking on eBay and Amazon and found them there, so I ordered a few
short lengths. There's a couple of photos of what they look like in the notes. It's just a flat rail
with raised edges that form a sort of a U shape when you look at it from the side. It's got mounting
holes and this sort of stuff, just a metal rail. So I went looking for a stand for this, because the
idea was to stand the rail, put the rail between a couple of stands, possibly more. I don't know,
but start off with a couple of stands and have it mounted on a surface table top shelf or something like
that. The first design I came up with was a bit too fragile and unstable. It's one of these things
not being an engineer myself. I couldn't quite visualize what it was going to be like when I saw
the design. We printed a couple of them. It came off thinniverse and there's a link to it if you're
interested. It's a triangular shape with the thin rail mounted. Well I just managed it on one side,
but you can mount one on each side, which might be slightly better. But it still seems to be quite
a thin design and not very rigid. And I'm not sure that if you did have two thin rails and put a
fair amount of equipment on it, whether it would be up to holding it up. So it wasn't happy with
it. There's a picture of what it looks like. Found a better design on the thinniverse again,
and this had the drawback that it was designed for the 15mm top hat rail. We didn't appreciate this
when we saw it and printed it. I say, I didn't appreciate it because I said how about this one
and the guy said, okay, we realized the mistake when the thing was printed and realized that it
would not suit the 5mm rail. So the simple answer was to print a shim, which was just based on
that geometry of the top of the stand with holes in it for mounting bolts and stuff. So put that
in the gap between the 7.5mm depth of the rail and the back of the stand. And as picture of this
showing the rail mounted on one of the stands, you can see the shim. The other thing we needed to do
is to make mounting plates or mounting units for bits of equipment to put on to the rail. So we printed
one for the Raspberry Pi 3B plus and another one for the SSD disc. It came from the source,
the first source. I've got links to these so I'm just calling them the first source and stuff.
And the one that didn't produce very nice stands, the actual fittings for hanging onto the rail
of great. The idea is that there's a hook at the top that goes over the top lip of the den rail
and then the bottom of it is secured with a locking tab that he slide into to a slot and push it up
and it's held by a friction. And image 9 in my list of images shows sort of back of you of how
this looks together. But the mounting plate for the Raspberry Pi is just screwed through,
it's just just a couple of arms which protrude out from the part that hooks over to the rail
over the rail and it's got holds in it to allow bolts to be placed through to fix the Raspberry Pi.
There's a couple of pictures here that show it in position. I have a bunch of nylon bolts
which I've bought in the bus to use for fixing Raspberry Pi's to things and that's what I used
a bit longer than they need to be but they do the job fine. The similar one for an SSD,
I bought one of the low price SSDs of Amazon, only 120 gigabytes but that should be enough
what I'm planning for. And you can see that it's a similar sort of idea. It's a slightly
more elegant design actually. It's got some curves in it. You can get some idea from these pictures
that we were still learning a way around this 3D printer. So the end result is not quite as pretty as
perhaps we could do now. Getting these things set up is quite an exercise but it does the job great
and I just happen to have a bunch of the connectors that will screw into the bolts that will screw
into the tapped holes on the back of an SSD. Picture nine shows the locking tabs on the rail.
So the final picture shows the rail on its stands. It's very nice and solid and stable. It's got
equipment mounted on it. There's quite a lot of room for more. I think I get one or two more
pies on there. I'm not sure how stable it will be with a lot of stuff on but it looks quite well
balanced. So I think it will be fine. The setup I've got is the Raspberry Pi where the USB port
are pointing upwards and the Ethernet connector. And next to it is the SSD which is connected with
the USB to SATA connector. I've routed the power lead round the back of the rail for this particular
one. It would be nice to do something better in terms of power distribution but that's for another
day but this is going to be really good especially since I can get several pies on here if I want more
and I do have several around the house that are doing various jobs. So you know things that
think something like this for mounting them properly. There's plenty of ventilation around it.
The only downside is going to be that if stuff gets dusty dust it's going to go into some of
these USB connectors and it's going to be all over the pie whereas when it's in a box it's less
of an issue but I think this will be as it'll be pretty good anyway. I'm not sure I would put a
spinning disk on this because it's not as rock solid as putting it straight onto a desk would be.
The other thing I'm not sure about is whether I need to drill mounting holes in the bottom of the
stand to fix it down to some surface but that's for the future. I hope you found that to be
interesting and it might convince you to go in a similar direction. Okay then bye.
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