Find the perfect 1U 10" Mini Rack UPS #1
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There's also the fully custom built solution... Reddit user u/ThatsMyUsernameDear built a DIY Backup power supply for 10" rack at home, building it with a Pulsar PSU, battery, fuse, and DC-DC converter (learning some lessons in the build from alarm systems). |
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Apparently Eaton makes the 3S, but it looks like it's not available in NA yet, only Europe? It powers a single device at 12+V, I think (so not AC power, but still useful).
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Also the Acumentrics Half Rack UPS, which is a bit beefy, probably pretty expensive... but does exist (also only DC out?). Thanks to @leomonty for finding it. |
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Schneider Electric also makes the HMIYMUPSKT1, which comes in at a healthy $614.23 in a single-unit purchase! Unfortunately it's discontinued—and also only had DC in and out, which limits it's ease of integration (besides the price)! |
ZeroKorThe ZeroKor is 48mm tall, so just a bit too tall to fit in 1U. It also will hold it's charge while powering a device, and if I unplug it from the wall, it cleanly transitions to battery power (drawing about 24W from the wall the entire time). However, it will not charge at all (at least in my testing so far) if the AC power outlet is switched on. It only starts charging once you switch AC power off :( |
Goal Zero Sherpa 100ACI've ordered one... but need to figure out how to adapt the round solar charging port (is that "8mm"? I would need to adapt it to the output of my portable Ecoflow panel, which has USB-C output (maybe could just use that) or XT60/XT60i... Maybe one of these adapters (be careful to pick the right ends!). |
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Jeff, What would be the exact specifications required for an ideal 1U 10” UPS? One option would be to repackage an existing offering into a container that fits the dimensions. This would likely maintain the engineered safety of the original device, within reason. The second option I could consider is combining or upgrading an existing offering into the ideal UPS. Did you contact any manufacturers of similar devices? Thank you for the content! |
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@GregM54 - I didn't contact GoalZero, but have talked to DeskPi. Something like the Goal Zero's guts, but wired up into a 1U case, with a larger fan (or two fans that can run more slowly) would be ideal. Especially if you could stick on multiple outlets, and put all ports on the rear, and status display on the front. |
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The perfect 1U 10" UPS would output proper AC (sin wave or at least triangle) at a reasonable power output (100W+) while being available and cheap. Things is that is not likely to happen, if you want to sell a device that is using AC you need to certify it and it is quite costly to certify AC products in US/CA. On a low-volume product, it would increase the cost quite significantly. Also for the DIY route, I personally wouldn't be comfortable creating a project that instructs people that might not have a lot of experience playing with AC. As it could be a fire hazard and could lead to potential electrocution. That said, if we were to create a DIY project that uses only low-voltage DC that could be quite interesting. Using something like this : https://www.mini-box.com/OpenUPS2 I used mini-box product in the past for a custom solution for a client and I was impressed by the build quality and software support. The only thing left to do is design a nice 3D printed case and a power distribution PCB that would split the power into 12V barrels and 5V USB. You could sell a kit on your website that includes the needed cable and hardware for the project. If this is something that could be of interest to you, we could work together to design the PD PCB and case. |
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@matthope-qc - If the market is big enough (units in the thousands instead of dozens or hundreds), I think we could convince a manufacturer to design a 1U device that wouldn't break the bank too badly. And there are ways to design a box that is DIY and safe, especially if you use an off the shelf power supply and inverter, install it into a metal box with adequate cooling and isolation, and then connect a battery with built-in protections (or stick to older batteries that are safer than a LiIon) externally; just providing the breadcrumbs for a DIY setup would be enough, though no warranties or safety implied! Regarding 12V / 5V DC — that would indeed make the whole setup simpler and not have to deal with the same amount of AC conversion and filtering. It would be nice to have a box that provides PoE++ output, plus has multiple 12V barrel jacks and/or USB-C PD outputs. |
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Found this fancy guy after watching your Project MINI RACK video. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D2PD734C It says it's 10.04". Has anyone tried this? |
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@geerlingguy @hybridlinux |
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This might be an option, https://www.omnicharge.co/products/omni-20 |
@matthope-qc - Unifi has a few switches:
And I believe they may have another switch or two coming that would fit in 10" |
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I have one that comes really close to being perfect for the Rackmate 10inch mini rack. It takes up 1U on the bottom using the extra bit of space at the bottom of the rack
Advantages:
Disadvantages:
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@geerlingguy @DJSdev |
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@matthope-qc Yep, I was surprised with how nicely it fit. I was intending to build a box to house the UPS, and then mount the Rackmate on top of the box because I assumed the UPS wouldn’t fit inside the rack, but to my surprise, it totally did. |
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How about this? https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006982467244.html |
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Hi, Jeff! I found this one (less than 1U high): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CKWXCMBD/?coliid=IHB0A7NYBB1IC&colid=X726OV811MGZ&psc=1&ref_=list_c_wl_ys_dp_it . It takes 65w PD to charge, so maybe a solar battery bank next to it top of rack would work: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DCVWG97Y/?coliid=I43UNALSBL0A5&colid=X726OV811MGZ&psc=1&ref_=list_c_wl_ys_dp_it |
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@Whitsme - The question with that one (as with many others I've found that don't have much of a charge circuit and cooling inside) is whether it would act as a true UPS, or like the ZeroKor, just doing one time discharge until you have to shut off AC power output to recharge the battery... would be interesting to see. @DJSdev I've added that Tripp Lite unit to the site, it would be great if they could make a rack mountable version! |
@geerlingguy I ordered one out of curiosity. I’ll let you know once it arrives. |
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Powergrid makes a Half Rack UPS—looks like two different models—but they seem like they may be pricey and also require some depth for proper mounting:
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Mini-Box's OpenUPS may be of interest to some. It's a pre-assembled PCB with components that supports multiple battery types (Li-Ion, Li-Po, SLA, Lifepo4) and supports being a NUT server over USB (repo guide here) with full support per NUT's compatibility page. It came up in my searches a year ago when looking at more compact UPSes that support NUT (very hard to find), for providing backup for a bunch of my low power network devices and Pi server but I didn't end up getting one (just used my existing Cyberpower unit for the time being). Saw a few positive experiences with them scattered around but no formal reviews. |
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So @geerlingguy, I’m an electrical engineer with extensive experience in product design, including battery power systems, solar power, and USB charging solutions. I’d love to collaborate on designing a purpose-built, compact, and affordable 10-inch 1U PDU/UPS tailored to the needs of this community. I would like to get a list of things that would be desirable in this device currently I am thinking base specs of the following: Battery specifications:
Input Specifications
Output Specifications
Control
At this point I am just getting specifications, so please comment on things you would want. |
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@robogeek78 Notes in no particular order:
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@chocmake Thank you for the pointer. Surprisingly, NUTS is barely mentioned, even in this issue. Vendors are elusive as well. The J60 is mentioned above as a variant with a USB port, but the port's capabilities are not clear (the manual directs users to use the included software). The Eaton Tripp Lite Cloud-Connected 350VA UPS also does not state local management compatibility (well, they say USB-C allows for a CLI management, not NUTS compatibility) — of course, pushing the cloud service. |
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I wonder if anyone has attempted mounting a UPS on the side of the rack instead of within the rack. Could be a workable solution on the 8U system. |
I was referring to USB/Ethernet/Serial IE not at the device, when i meant control
Which 200w spec are you meaning? Solar Input? 200W inverter?
Yeah i can see about Nav Buttons of some sort.
OLED is required if we want local control and menu system, I am way more partial to small OLEDs than LCDs
I noted 6x in the spec, would you want more than that?, think 6x 100W ports and 1 240W port
I can do individual control. I will look at sizing and spacing, if i can do more i will provide those
In the chip I am planning to use, OUT VS IN/OUT is a setting no additional cost Do you have thoughts on what ports/control is in the "front" vs the "back" |
IMO, USB or ethernet if you want to integrate with https://networkupstools.org/ .
The AC inverter. 200W as an overall system out seems like it's going to be the thing people notice the most, imo. I don't think 240W USB-C is going to be all that useful; the main thing that uses is (afaik) is gaming laptops, and I just don't see wanting to charge your gaming laptop from your 10" rack. Maybe I'm just crazy, though. (Plus, you might have problems producing 240W USB-C at all; Framework certainly was. Consider it a bonus, not a minimum).
Yeah, I was just letting you know that at least some users would consider that a "neat extra", not a hard requirement.
If we're talking USB-C instead of AC, then yeah, you're going to need more than 6 ports. But, I don't think that's what you're after. If there's 2x AC + 6x USB-C, that's a more reasonable answer. Plug PDU(s) into AC, power a PoE network switch from AC, and then power the raspis from PoE. Then the USB-C ports are just neat extras for either charging cell phones or plugging in random gear that happens to need it. And if 6x ports isn't enough, there's always the AC ports as a fallback.
My current UPS has all AC in the back, and all controls upfront. But, TechnoTim specifically has his PDU + AC plugs up front. So, there's arguments for both. And with 10" racks, flexibility of what goes where becomes even more important. The one thing I can say is that if you put controls in the back, I wouldn't necessarily bother with more than LED on/off indicators and on/off switches. We can do the fancy stuff like reading the current power draw and configuring power-loss-behavior up front. |
Lenovo Tinys can be powered via USB-C (can use fixed voltage USB-C adapters to the Lenovo plug) and are a very popular system in minilabs. That said powering them by USB-C is not often seen used, partly from lack of knowledge but also I think as various multi-port USB-C chargers aren't great at handling constant high load temperature-wise and most renegotiate power on other ports when a cable is removed in one port, causing power resets (see eg. the AllThingsOnePlace channel for analyses). Edit: ignore, misread the context being a single port. A single Tiny would never pull that much even with a non-T CPU swap. |
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It's important to note that a "power bank" is most definitely NOT an UPS for a few very important reasons. The switching from mains power to battery does not happen fast enough and usually there is a very brief period when power is interrupted. Some devices can handle this without any issue, but it is definitely not "healthy" to do. A true UPS usually has some capacitors to cover that brief period of switching the power source. Lithium-Ion batteries have their life and performance seriously impacted if kept at a high state of charge for long period of times. Battery cell manufacturers usually have two voltage ratings for their cells, one is a higher voltage for short term high capacity, and another lower voltage for long term but reduced capacity. A power bank is optimised for maximum capacity and will charge its cells to maximum voltage supported by the cells, while a true UPS should trade some of that storage capacity for an extended cell life and only charge to and maintain a lower cell voltage. The Eaton mentioned above is a good example of a true UPS vs the more common power bank. The nice thing about the 12V is that there is a plethora of splitters, converters and other accessories for it. Hope this helps... |
That's how I would expect a double-conversion UPS to behave. For a standby UPS, I would test that theory before trusting it with a medical device (I'm somewhat unimpressed by my APC Smart-UPS X). According to https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/what-ups-transfer-time-is-acceptable.1429523/ (not the most reliable source), 10ms switchover time is acceptable. Wouldn't do it for actually critical loads without testing, but common enough. The EcoFlow Delta 3 Plus has a switchover time of 10ms. That said, they do have legalese on other pages saying their products can't be used as a UPS for medical devices and critical workloads. |
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I bought an RP2350 dev board and an RMII PHY to tinker a bit with the software side of a UPS. I found https://www.hackster.io/abratchik/hid-compliant-ups-with-arduino-75198c by @abratchik which implements the USB HID PDC https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/pdcv11.pdf on an Arduino and has created a C library: https://github.com/abratchik/HIDPowerDevice. I'll try to get this running on the RP2350. And then I also want to try to implement the UPS management information base https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1628 via SNMP https://git.savannah.nongnu.org/cgit/lwip/lwip-contrib.git/tree/examples/snmp by using this Pico ethernet library: https://github.com/rscott2049/pico-rmii-ethernet_nce |
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I remember seeing this Elecstore 100W NPS that looked nice and was relatively inexpensive, but unfortunately wasn’t available for sale outside of SA… Edit: This is probably their OEM lol. |
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@robogeek78 I've been playing around with the idea of designing a custom OSHW power distribution/backup system, too. AC is a bit of a chore to deal with in my opinion, so I was planning on using an off-the-shelf AC/DC to take AC input and provide DC power, and then the custom PDU board would only have to handle charging/discharging the batteries and stepping voltage up/down as needed. The voltage outputs that seemed most necessary from doing a little research about what people like to run in their half-racks are below, but you (and everyone else) are welcome to let me know if I missed any (or if I'm overestimating how necessary any of them are):
I'm thinking a straightforward 16s1p bank of 18650s for battery backup, since COTS battery management ICs tend to max out at 16 cells, and you'd need around that many in series if you want to feed the high voltages required for PoE+ supplies without step-up. If you use modest 3000mAh Li-Ion cells, that's ~175Wh, which should be enough to run an efficient rack for quite a while, and certainly more than enough to give a high-power rack time to gracefully shut down if the input power doesn't return promptly. With a bit of clever design I'm pretty sure it would be possible to support multiple battery types, too, so those who aren't running high-voltage supplies could get away with cheaper/safer chemistries like LiFePO4 if they wanted (just don't mix-and-match in the same unit!). Total power rating is variable; I've seen inexpensive 48V AC/DC supplies slim enough for 1U with rated outputs as high as 450W, assuming I can squeeze all the batteries and other circuitry into the remaining space. I haven't done a lot of research on the control side yet, though. As someone who barely even cosplays as a sysadmin, let alone actually working as one, I'm not sure exactly where to start on that part. What kind of interfaces are typical for this? What would be the most useful for the applications that are most common in half-racks (Raspberry Pis, Mini-PCs, Routers/Switches, etc.)? PMBus? Some kind of web endpoint served to the network? A simple Hi/Lo digital signal? If/when I get past the research phase I'll start posting some notes and design info to a repo on GitHub. Are there any other features that would be good to include on a DC-only UPS? |
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This ups would be extra useful to me if it uses batteries that are legal to carry on a plane or in luggage |
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I came across this Powerbank. It's pretty close to what I think most of my use cases would need. Almost all my Mini PCs can be run from DC and the rest are mostly USB. That said, my current thought is to repurpose a EGO 56V style battery pack to make a standardized pack to fit into the 1U UPS. The UPS would consist of a replaceable battery (EGO 56V guts with it's BMS in a custom case) and the UPS controller. The 1U controller would handle communicating with telemetry and control info to the attached devices. It would also have a bus that would provide the native battery voltage for snap in modules that would provide different power delivery methods. The modules would have a data bus so they can extend the basic functionality. For instance there might be a 12V barrel module that is either on or off and a USB module that allows switching multiple ports individually. It would be nice to have two slots for batteries, to allow for hot swapping. Charging is my big unknown. I'd want USBC PD and DC in. I hope this gives people some ideas. It's pretty much a brain dump of what I am looking for. I think I can design something that almost gets there, but have some doubts on the power input side. |
Most of these voltages could be handled by USB-C (5, 12, 15, 20v) and I found that my mini-pc will take 20v even though its rated for 19v, only thing that couldn't would be POE hardware (which you could just integrate separately away as an injector). I just did a full USB-C rack #100 and it works great. Would definitely be cool to see a small PCB that takes in 3-6s of Li-ion and just makes a giant UPS from it |
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I'm afraid I'm far out of my depth in this conversation but I came across this product on amazon and was wondering what the pitfalls might be? If my rack mostly consists of USB-C or Barrel Jack powered devices like Unifi switches/gateways and maybe some raspberry Pis or Mini PCs, what types of problems does this present? Other than needing to make a custom solution for mounting in a rack. |
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My mini-rack has a mix of Intel NUC (20V barrel jack) and RPis. Also: a KVM (12v barrel jack) and ethernet switch (12v barrel jack). |
You could use a USB-C charging stations (here's one as an example) and USB-C to DC barrel cables. These are available in 5V, 9V, 12V and 19V but make sure the USB-C charger supports that voltage as part of the PD (Power Delivery) protocol. These cables have a small chip that negotiates and requests the specific voltage from the charger. I use a few of these in a similar setup and they work extremely well. |
and others
...since one doesn't exist, maybe someone should make one!
The space constraint is real, but you could definitely build a UPS with one or two AC outlets on the back, supplying something like 60-140W of total power, with an integrated Li-Ion battery—and still have enough room for decent power filtering.
Right now, the three commercial products I've seen that might fit the bill are:
I really would like an AC UPS, because that'd be compatible with most anything... however, if you have an adequate PoE switch, maybe a 12V/19V/24V DC UPS would be adequate, with just a barrel-jack output (or multiple barrel jack outputs...?).
The trouble is, some people will build racks with USB-C powered devices. Some will build racks entirely powered by PoE, and yet others will require AC adapters... so being able to serve everything would be ideal.
I've ordered the ZeroKor, since the price is right, and I intend to see if it'll fit at the bottom of my RackMate T0 and serve power to my PoE-powered Pi rack setup, which consumes 17W at idle, and probably 40-50W max.
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