The Cruiser and the Mini Rack: One Board to Run It All
A typical home lab rack is two devices doing a job one device could do. The Exaviz Cruiser removes the layer where you need a separate switch.
A typical home lab rack looks something like this:
A Raspberry Pi running Home Assistant. A PoE switch next to it to power everything else. Two power supplies. A handful of cables. It works, but it’s two devices doing a job one device could do.
The Exaviz Cruiser flips that around. The PoE switch is built into the board. You get 8 ports of PoE+ (add an Interceptor PoE Board for 8 more at 10/100), a CM5 running your stack, NVMe storage, and 2.5GbE WAN, all in one Mini-ITX form factor. There is no separate switch.
That means your PoE ports are free to do something useful:
- A Raspberry Pi running Pi-hole for network-wide ad blocking
- A JetKVM for remote keyboard/video/mouse access to other machines in the rack
- An ADS-B SDR receiver for aircraft tracking
- A PoE-powered GL-iNet router as a dedicated VPN gateway
- A second Pi as a Docker or Kubernetes worker node
Every one of those devices is standard 802.3af. Eight class 3 devices reserve 15W each, which lands exactly on the Cruiser’s 120W PoE budget (firmware 1.1.2 or later). One cable per device, power and data together. No power bricks, no outlet hunting.
And for this kind of build, you can run the whole thing off our 48V 4A power supply. One small power brick covering the Cruiser and every device hanging off it. That’s your entire rack on a single supply. If you add the PoE Board for 16 ports, size the supply at 6.5 to 7A.
The mini rack community has been building toward this kind of setup for years. The Cruiser just removes the layer where you need a separate switch to make it work.
See the Cruiser Carrier Board. Documentation is at exa-pedia.com.