EMF Village Mini Rack

I went to EMF 2026 with some friends as a village, and we thought it would be good to build a rack with a server on for hosting the village website, an ARG someone developed, a file server and a few other odds and ends, a network switch so we could all plug in (handy when the wifi went down for an hour or two) and the power supply for our PoE smart village sign.

### Devices

From top to bottom:

1. MikroTik CSS318-16G-2S+IN mounted backwards. We went for this because it had two sfp ports and loads of RJ45s, so we could get a 10G FTTT (Fibre to the tent :p) connection for the switch, then have the server on another fast connection, and have a load of 1g ports for users to plug their laptops into and for other things in the rack. The management features were helpful to isolate the two WLED devices from the wider network so people wouldn't play with the settings
2. Geekpi 0.5U 12 place patch panel. In most situations a patch panel is used to run from things on the rack to the front, then they loop out and back into a switch, but all these went directly to the switch for village members to plug in to.
3. HP Prodesk 600 mini G6. This has some i3, 16gb of ram, honestly it was just the best deal on a tinyminimicro system i could find on ebay when i was hunting. I bought the 2.5G FlexIOV2 expansion all excited for fast networking then discovered to my immense disappointment HP lock it out on the BIOS for the prodesk systems, you have to use an elitedesk to use the fancy NIC so it's just vestigial. At some point i'll pick up an elitedesk and find a home for it.
4. Aliexpress 6 dive 2.5 inch bay. I actively refuse to share more info about this as it was terrible and was the cause of our system being offline for the first day. The drives (6 240gb intel datacenter SSDs) are not well constrained and the car journey shook them to the extent they werent connecting into the backplane but looked like they were connected fine, I blamed the M.2 to sata adapter because every drive was unavailable, but reseating each caddy brought them back. This is getting replaced ASAP
5. 2X dell Wyze 3040s. These are...fine, we didn't end up using them for anything though.
6, 7, 8. Power. Originally the plan was to chuck this in the bottom and use it to power literally everything including the HP prodesk because it's huge https://uk.ugreen.com/products/ugreen-nexode-500w-6-port-gan-desktop-fast-charger but we ended up not using it for the HP but using it for both Wyzes, the drive bay and the ESP32 running wled in the top of the rack for more blinkenlights. The HP is powered by its stock power supply, the mikrotik has a built-in supply so i just made a custom shorter power cable to try and keep the cable mess relatively contrained. A PDUonline 4x IEC 2x BS PDU has power for everything, so there's just one cable to plug in to bring everything online. The PoE injector for the sign didn't really fit so I had to print some taller feet for the whole thing, I also designed and printed some ribs that went behind the acrylic panels in the sides that cables could be ziptied to for management, as well as stiffening braces for the bottom of the rack, and some cable hooks and feet for the back so if it was knocked over it wouldn't damage anything.

### Future plans

Aside from the drive bay being crap it worked pretty well, but for next time we're definitely gonna make some changes:

1. A dedicated router, not having a router made lots of things a real headache, finding the IP for the server when we first got there was a fight in and of itself, and we could do better VLANing of the IoT devices that really shouldn't be publicly accessible
2. ditch the Wyzes as we didn't use them at all
3. move to a 6u mini rack just to make it that bit easier to cart around, if we're dropping the wyzes we can use a smaller power supply that'll only take up 1u instead of 2u, so there will be room for the additional router even with the smaller rack

At some point I will upload the parts I designed to somewhere like printables or thingiverse but for the mean time they can be found here: https://willowherring.dev/files/Cablemng-BodyFillet002.stl https://willowherring.dev/files/rackcablehangerv3.stl https://willowherring.dev/files/brace-BodyFillet.stl https://willowherring.dev/files/cablehook-BodyFillet.stl

The issue contains a build description and photographs but does not mention any repository file, test, or requested code change. Start by checking how mini-rack builds are documented in this repository and whether this build belongs there; done is unclear because no target location or acceptance criteria are provided.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.