Sunday, April 4, 2021

Pi^4 case and Meanwell PSU

This is one of the MeanWell power supplies I bought months ago to run the Pi4's. As you can see a bare-bones PSU but capable of outputting 14amps at 5v, which is enough to run about 7 Pis without peripherals.

 

And here is one in a cover back from the 3D printing place. This was their prototype which needs more work but it was hard enough to get it back from them. They had it and the Pi^4 case for almost 6 months.


 

This is the Pi^4 case (Mk I) that I did some years ago. I have changed the fans to 40x20mm (the original had 40x10mm) and its now got 8GB Pi4's in there. I had a revision to the top but the sample they printed off wasn't right.


Now that I have finally got them back I hooked up the PSU and its running the Pi4's. If I can get the design for the PSU and case revised I hope to run 3 of these.

Rosetta@home decided to change their minimum system requirements to 6.6GB of free memory and 8.5GB of free disk space. As a result the two Pi4's 4GB with the black heatsink case that you see behind the Pi^4 case are no longer able to get work from the project so they're now running Einstein only.

I also had to buy four 32GB micro SD cards as the 16GB ones that I normally use didn't quite have enough free space. I got four of the Sandisk Ultra Plus which seem to be a little faster than the Sandisk Ultra. I usually get the smallest, cheapest ones as they wear out eventually.


3 comments:

mikey said...

Do you clone your SD cards so you don't have to reload them every time?

Mark G James said...

Its funny you should ask Mikey. I was thinking of doing a post about how I set up the Pis with BOINC.

No I don't clone the SD cards. I start with a clean install of Raspberry Pi OS (64 bit) and then do a sudo raspi-config to change password, set hostname, etc. Once its rebooted I mount my NFS storage server as a drive and copy the rest off it. The whole process only takes about 5-10 minutes.

mikey said...

I was thinking of cloning because of all the Boinc projects and it's a pain to do it manually, I'm guessing that's part of what you copy off your NFS server.