Desktop raised floor

It's been a while since I've posted about a project I've done rather than a tool or some of my reversing work. This one is purely mechanical too!

First, a little background. I have a lot of FPGA/CPLD/MCU dev boards on my desk. By "a lot" I don't mean two or three... more like 20. Powering this much hardware presents some interesting problems. I don't have that many USB ports (and many of them need more power than USB can provide). Wallwarts are another obvious solution, but I don't have enough outlets or wallwarts to power 20 boards either!

I made three bar-shaped USB hubs with male mini-B ports, to plug into small development boards backplane-style. This helped a bit, but as my collection of boards grew the situation got worse.

By last May, my desk looked something like this:

My desk full of cables

Despite extensive efforts to manage the cable disaster with split tubing, there was still a giant octopus. Worse yet, my power strips were full and half of my boards didn't even have power.

The first step was to replace the loose boards with a datacenter-style "raised floor". I bought a 2x3 foot sheet of clear blue acrylic from McMaster-Carr, carefully floorplanned where all of the boards would go, and then drilled holes for each board's mounting standoffs.

Drilling holes

This operation had to be done out on the kitchen table because my office was too small to work comfortably in.

Mounting USB hubs

I mounted all of the USB hubs to the underside of the board in order to save space on top for dev boards and things I was likely to need to probe. While this seemed a good idea at first, reaching underneath them to run cables was a little tricky. After finishing the build I replaced the legs with ones several inches longer to provide the necessary hand clearance.

Before running cables, I attached all of the boards and brought it back to my desk to test the fit.

The apparatus on my desk

The "hostnames" on labels below each board are used as node names for my batch scheduler and unit test framework (more on that in a future post). In addition, those boards with Ethernet interfaces are assigned a constant IP address by my DHCP server, recorded in DNS with that hostname so I can write test cases using hostnames instead of raw IP addresses.

In an effort to reduce cable mess, I made custom cut-to-size USB cables out of cat5 cable and soldered on USB plugs. This was a very slow and laborious process because the connectors tended to melt very easily no matter what temperature I ran the iron at. BGA is no problem for me but these connectors gave me a hard time; I had yields somewhere around 60-70% even after rework. The rest of the time the connectors were melted beyond repair.

Despite the pain, I think the results were worth it. I was a little worried about signal quality as USB is supposed to be 90 ohm Zdiff and cat5e is 100, but I've noticed no problems. I did try to find 90 ohm cables but had trouble locating any.

Custom USB cables

After running all of the cables I could, a few of the boards were still unpowered and there were wallwarts everywhere, but the data wiring was a bit neater. Definitely a step in the right direction, but more work was needed.

After initial deployment

After taking that picture, I replaced most of the red electrical tape with zip ties and stick-on mount points. This made the setup a lot neater but I don't have any photos of that handy.

In order to tidy it up properly, I needed to tackle the power problem. My solution to that is a bit of a long story so I'll save that for next post :)