I know this is OT for the Soekris list, but folks here seem resourceful, and the question is caused by my Soekris. What is a good source for rackmount enclosures for UPS-style batteries, and for a 12V UPS switch/control?
Right now, my home infrastructure (a Soekris 5501 with external disk drives, and a handful of other network components) runs on a variety of 12V wall warts, all powered off a 3KVA rackmount UPS, even though it only consumes about 60W. This is a great big mess, large, not power efficient (the UPS wastes more than it outputs), and generally ugly. So I'm going to organize it. Step 1: Build a custom 2U rackmount case for the Soekris 5501, booting either from a small SATA SSD (solid-state disk) or from CF, with two external large SATA disks using a PCI SATA controller, and with a miniPCI 802.11 card. The whole thing gets powered by 12V (with the disk drives having their own 5V and 12V DC-DC converters, not using the Soekris internal supply). I'm resigned to having to custom-build my own 19" rackmount case, which is not difficult, just tedious (saw, file, sheetmetal work, spraypaint, done). I'll start with a generic 2U rackmount enclosure from Digikey or such, and use standoffs to mount the whole Soekris enclosure (with lid removed) inside it; this removes the need to make individual cutouts for all the connectors on the Soekris board. Step 2: Take the existing lead-acid batteries (all 12V 7.2Ah, some from the existing UPS, some from a homebrew 12V UPS), and mount about 8 or 12 of them in a rackmount enclosure. This gives me enough capacity to get through a whole night. Does anyone know where I can find a rackmount enclosure that is designed to hold lead-acid batteries? Given that this works out to about 60 lbs, starting with a generic 3U enclosure and modifying it myself is likely to be work. Step 3: Build the electronics for a 12V 60W UPS (with some headroom, say size it ). This seems to be easy: start with a 13.8V power supply (Astrodyne has those in reasonable sizes), and add the failover switch / charger combination; a little web search finds suitable units for example from www.powerstream.com or www.transtronics.com. Do people have recommendations on which modules to use? Then building a pseudo- PDU (a bunch of fuses and connectors) is easy. Step 3: Wire it all up in a small 19" rack. Suggestions? Criticism? -- Ralph Becker-Szendy [email protected] (408)395-1435 735 Sunset Ridge Road; Los Gatos, CA 95033 _______________________________________________ Soekris-tech mailing list [email protected] http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
