The compute in my home lab consists of six Intel NUCs. I hope to describe my rationale for choosing these PCs in greater detail in a future post, but for my purposes they work well.
I’m fortunate enough these days to have a closet in which I run my entire lab environment, and which will fit a 22U 19 inch server rack. But there are few available options for rack mounting Intel NUCs — none of which are affordable to me or, I would imagine, the typical home labber.
Melted Plastic FTW
I first got a Creality Ender 3v2 printer on Christmas of 2022. Since that time, I’ve downloaded a bunch of small, useful things to print. I’ve also created a few things of my own. One of the very first things I designed was a rack mount for my NUCs. The first iteration was… okay. It was sufficient, but with my lack of experience, I was very concerned about the sturdiness of the mount. This led me to settle on a design that used a length of threaded rod for added support, and used small mounting trays and tracks to hold the NUCs themselves. This only allowed sliding the NUC out of the rack to the rear, which kind of defeated the purpose. But good enough was good enough at the time.
The more I physical work I did with the rack, the more I found myself getting annoyed by that rack mount. Having to remove the NUCs from the rear was certainly less than optimal, the trays never fit quite right, and in general it was boxy and ugly with sharp corners and just a generally clunky feel. So a few months ago, I decided to sit down and design a new version.
Rack Mount v2
I’ve not spent much time learning CAD using Fusion or the like. But Tinkercad is perfect for me: simple, straightforward, and capable, it does everything I need it to do. A few things I wanted to focus on in this next iteration were making it stronger without additional pieces like threaded rod, making the NUCs more easily accessible, and just generally creating a more polished, “professional”-looking product. Over the course of several days (and a bunch of trial and error prints), I was able to put something together that has worked well enough for me that I’m comfortable sharing it for general use.
This version is much stronger — perhaps a little overbuilt, in some ways. It’s printed in 3 parts, and assembled using M3 nuts and flathead screws. The NUCs slide in and out with relative ease and have plenty of ventilation. It’s 3U tall. The holes on the front face are there for screws I decided I don’t really need.
I printed it using PolyMaker PLA Pro. A stronger material like PETG might be better, but after about 4 months of continuous operation, I haven’t noticed any warping, sagging or any other issues.
Take a look at the STLs here:
LEFT:
MIDDLE:
RIGHT:
The STLs are available at the links below. I hope you find them useful!
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6724212
https://connley.net/stl/nuc_rack/nuc_rackmount_left.stl