The DeskPi 2U Case: A Purpose-Built Home for the Cruiser
DeskPi built a 2U mini rack enclosure specifically for the Exaviz Cruiser. Jeff Geerling put it through its paces in his latest video.
The Cruiser is a Mini-ITX board, but it’s not a typical one. With 8 PoE+ ports, dual SATA, 2.5GbE WAN, HDMI, USB, and barrel jack power, there’s more IO on it than any standard ITX case was designed to accommodate.
DeskPi saw that as a design opportunity.
Their 2U Mini Rack Mount Case is built specifically for the Cruiser. It’s compact, rack-mountable, and has cutouts in all the right places. The front panel exposes the ports through a wide IO opening and locks in two Dell R720-style drive sleds. The whole thing drops into a desktop mini rack or sits on a shelf.
Jeff Geerling featured the case in one of his latest videos, where he rebuilt his Pi-based open-source surveillance server around the Cruiser and the DeskPi enclosure:
The build he put together is worth paying attention to:
- Exaviz Cruiser with a Compute Module 5
- DeskPi 2U case with two 4TB IronWolf NAS drives in R720 sleds
- Hailo-8 AI accelerator for object detection
- Open-source NVR software running in Docker with three cameras
Jeff reported CPU usage under 5% and object detection at 10 to 11ms with three cameras.
What makes this case impressive for the mini rack community is that it solves the enclosure problem cleanly. The Cruiser replaces a PoE switch, a Pi, and a storage server with one board. The DeskPi 2U case gives that board a proper home, with drive bays, ventilation and a front panel power button, all in a 2U footprint that fits a desktop rack.
The case is currently a prototype in pre-order at $69.99 from DeskPi. Jeff noted a few areas DeskPi is still refining (drive sled cabling, a power LED, and airflow direction over the CM5), but the bones are solid.
You can read Jeff’s full writeup on his blog or watch the video above.
See the Cruiser Carrier Board. Documentation is at exa-pedia.com.