I think you want to say 5W? Amperage is just half of the equation. :)

The name has been in my family far longer than that program has existed, so the way I see it, if anything, they are copying me xD

I knew a couple of people who studied in continental Europe under the Erasmus scheme before Brexit, and the far right were always claiming during the referendum campaign that the EU would never chuck the UK out of anything because we're so awesome and they need us and our money so much. Turns out there's a limit to how much a club misses its most loudly critical influential member.

So amongst Europhile Brits, Erasmus means young people's opportunities to study abroad first, and name from history that it honours second. I might not have heard of Erasmus if it weren't for the Erasmus scheme, and I had to check just now whether he was a historical figure or someone from Greek mythology. Awesome surname for a person in real life to have, though.

Huh? What is the mains cable mess for then?

I don't think I understand your question.

If you plug all your servers into a power strip like this, all the power goes through the power strip and through one cable.
If there is a fault in the power strip, all the servers will lose power as a fuse will trip.

The same is true for my setup, I have added no new failure modes.

A homelab can accept a lot more downtime than a company that runs business off of a rack of servers.

A tradeoff between a sweet rack design for having to disassemble a little extra when replacing parts is a perfectly valid tradeoff for me.

Hell, most of us only run a single UPS, if any at all, which would have the same limitation.

Hah, yea I used a pre made box to cover off on safety in the lazy way. Using one of these boards inside it: https://a.co/d/08aDId5p

Most of my custom work was on the front so I could fit multiple mini PCs side by side. Everything designed in FreeCAD with color coded cables per machine 😀

Edit: ignore the circle. Apparently this photo was used to tell my partner what to unplug during some testing.

I’m assuming this is daisy chained. In a power strip there are not cables between the plugs that can be unplugged. Nor are there switches on each individual plug that can be accidentally flipped off. Any extra component is a failure mode. If it gets unplugged it loses power just the same as any failure. Now don’t get me wrong, I think this design is clean, expandable, and offers some neat features over a plain power strip, but to suggest there aren’t extra risks associated with this design is a bit short sighted.

Very nice, is that a KWS rack?

I don't think that existed yet when I started my journey, they seem very solid.

I went for aluminum for max strength and didn't trust 3D printed parts for strength, but after getting a printer, I see you can print fold out chairs that you can stand on, so they can be more than strong enough.

You're explaining scenarios where you incorrectly use my setup.

You can wire the switches so that if switched off it only kills power to that server and nothing else in the chain.
You then basically have this, but modular:

Yea if you rip out a cord that you shouldn't you're going to lose power, that is true of any power strip.

This has more components, so more things can fail, I will give you that, but that's unlikely and for me at least, worth the trade off in making it modular.

If the above picture was powering your servers, and you wanted to add a 7th plug, you'd have to unplug everything and buy a power adapter with more sockets, and deal with the rats nest of cables that follows, or add another of these that might have the same problem in the future.

Power strips run in parallel that's one point of failure for the whole rig.

Your setup runs in series. That's on point of failure per powered device in the rig.

And if it doesn't run in series, you really need to explain the wiring on the back of your rig, because I cannot make sense of it otherwise.

I have basically taken a power strip, and made each plug a module.

The inside of a power strip, like in this image, is in series.

mains → yellow → red → blue → green → blue(end)

If a join between yellow and red is broken, it knocks out red and everything after it.

If what is plugged into yellow is plugged out, or disconnects everything else keeps working.

The same is true for my setup, the joins between Yellow, red etc. are just on the outside of the case, so you can disconnect them if you want, which would kill the power to what is after it.
But you don't have to do that.

I think I understand more now, I just fundamentally don't understand that zig-zag of joins on the back if the point was better wire management.

I can't imagine how'd you'd link them up, without having to reach inside the case, and having it modular.

Ideally the zig zag isn't there, but did you see the before?

It's a Rackmate T2. I printed the parts in ASA, which is very heat resistant, and it's held up for a long time against all the hot equipment. It's also pretty thin on the HD sled holders, still doesn't sag or budge.

I should probably make these models public at some point.

Yep exactly, thats why its 10A rated, technically someone could wire a 20A appliance to a 10A plug, which I have encountered a few times, and it will be fine for a few minutes. Depending on what type breaker is installed it may trip before that anyway.

We stand on the sholders of giants.

It's always good to give back to the community and open source it

Oh yes, I've got a few popular FOSS projects out in the world, these would just go on my dumping ground of a site 😉

His design is parallel, you're just seeing it from the wrong perspective.

It might be clearer to say it's more like your house wiring, instead of a power strip.

This is almost exactly how outlets are Daisy chained through a run.

Basically you have a homelab where every device is plugged into the next outlet along a wall, with each outlet being really close together.

This might be a better angle.