Hi. This is part 2 of the Raspberry Pi supercomputer cluster that I'm building and a lot of people asked for a second part to this thing. I continued on. where's it at? Well, Ok, no I haven't done anything on it, but I Was thinking about the case for the thing and then I remembered I've got three of these babies I scored from the dumpster the Apple G5 Power Mac And these cases are just beautiful.

all aluminium cases and the things that these are absolutely useless on their own arm. The processor in them is like the old G5 Art processor. It's absolutely ancient. It's an absolutely no use, but you can get this thing out.

Come on there we go. We have a beautiful aluminium case. We've got the fans airflow through the front grills here. so I thought what if we actually were dusting? There's pretty horrible.

but what if we actually sorry I'll change the angle because I wanted to show you the the Apple symbol there and what if I actually replaced the motherboard in this thing with a huge motherboard that actually contained all of the Raspberry Pi our boards on them. and then we can reuse the power supply which is in the base of this thing and we've got the fans. We've got a beautiful aluminium case. I Thought that'd be pretty neat for a redesign to fit all in there.

So let's just take this thing apart and have a squiz where we wrap with that. And there's the specs on this thing for those playing along at home. 1.6 gig. look at their SAR 512 mega memory 160 gig hard drive.

You know these G5 processor machines? Yeah, they're just so absolutely useless for anything today, but let's rip the guts out of it and see what we got. guys. A lot of dust in this thing. absolutely terrible and I'm all out of compressed air bugger and people have actually turn these cases into, you know, coffee tables and seats and all sorts of weird and wonderful stuff.

And they're actually got like a cult following these cases. and I believe they sell for a pretty penny on eBay or got ourselves a fan in there. What brand is? Oh I'm not sure my brand's anyway. the fan noise and stuff like this in I haven't powered it up since the last video.

but I Love how it just comes out and everything is quite modular inside these puppies, so let's try and get the rest of it out. There's a pop, right? Oh, that one's not as modular. Yeah, let's just talking it up. and there we go.

Got to get cables out roof. good speaker as the graphics card inside this puppy. For those playing along at home, it's an Nvidia job I'm not sure. Absolutely ancient.

It'd be interesting to see the performance of this ancient Nvidia card Compared to say are the GPU inside a you know, a fairly modest A GPU inside the modern art Raspberry Pi and Allwinner chipsets? Hmm. this fan here pops out as well once again and of course, if the existing knife found solutions in these were buggered, although too loud or whatever, I'm sure the airflow would be more than adequate for what we need for a Raspberry Pi supercomputer cluster. although we haven't I don't calculated the power and everything else yet. but anyway, we could don't replace those fans if we had to.

No worries. and that's an A 10:47 for those playing along at home. Everyone loves playing along at home now. I Might have actually picked the wrong machine to open up here I Didn't remember what one was one, but this is different to the one I did I had a peek inside before on my previous video.

This one has got Stanwell You know, not a PC standard, but they've got the power supplies under here of course. So they've got these Molex type power connectors but the other machine that I took apart and these beautiful and here's a video of it from the previous one: these beautiful studs coming out which went directly into the board. There was no wiring or anything like that, it was just a beautiful design and interfacing from the power supply through to the motherboard. Now which one? I Do which one might be better? I'm tempted to use the sexy solution, the one with the the studs that stick up and then just screw directly into the motherboard.

No, of course I can design my Raspberry Pi base board motherboard to actually support those. You get the dimensions right. Everything else you drill the because you put the studs in and there's no whirring. So um yeah I don't know which one.

Pros and cons both ways. Hmm. Actually the worst part about this power? Mac design. If you look right down in here, there's the modem.

It's got a modem connector on the back and Rj11 You'll know that cable running all the way out there. It runs all the way up all the way up. and here is them: is the actual modem module all the way over on the odd diagonally opposite side of the motherboard. What the hell were they thinking? That's just ridiculous.

Otherwise, beautiful systems engineering inside this thing. But yeah, that's big thumbs down. So it took the memory modules out and ER there's the Big Molex or one of them. They've actually got two of these as I sent one over that side as well I got that one out and there it is.

So I'm sure I can get the pin outs for these babies somewhere. have to look that up. and then from the front panel they've got this. This is like the UH power connector.

It's got a USB and a firewire in an audio I think and that's just some little weird us are smaller pitch one. You can still get those though, but you know, like that's really annoying I Don't want? probably don't want to reuse the soft power switch on the front I'm not sure if I'd go to the effort to redo that I'd need to get the pin out for that I don't know, it's the full service manual for this G5 available online. haven't even looked yet. kind of just winging it at the moment.

But yeah, whether or not I go for the stud solution or put the Molex connector like that onto my board and then just you know, reuse that I don't know. Six of one, half dozen of the other. All right. let's lift this processor module out of here.

Tada. And there it is. Ah, beautiful. Look at that board to board high speed interface connector that is just beautiful.

Look at the bypassing surrounding that G5 processor. just absolutely ridiculous. Big heat pipe and everything else on there and that is just you know I believe these are really power hungry beasts Foxconn job of course. and yeah, these are just that is a big-ass heatsink on a processor which is like your mobile phone probably has more power than this thing these days.

It's really interesting trying to get this baby apart. It slides out, take out a couple of posts something. I still got one left there, but this divider here seems to be screwed into the board from the other side, so it's probably going to come out with the motherboard. but the motherboard should slide in that way slightly and lift out and that's what it looks like anyway, because you can see the pins down in there for the sliding part of it.

One of those this should slide it like that and then up. Yep, Yep, Yep Yep yep yep yep. all the way. All the connectors are in the way, but if you get those over, should eventually come out.

Mmm. somehow let me work on it. Hey Whoa. That was a bit tricky, but there she is.

It's the main board. Oh, look at the heat piping on the bottom of that baby. Didn't see that one in the previous teardown. Nice little chunky fin heatsink on the bottom of the BGA there which is under the processor.

That's like the interface I Don't know the back architecture, the G5 processor system architecture and stuff, but obviously they need that big-ass BGA Their 2-way interface with the processor is that something moves up to like a memory controller or I/o interface. Something like that, you can see the differential pair traces all come down here to this baby, which is another one. Ah, there that would be given its location that would be a bridge slasher interface driver for the for the slots there I would be guessing and wow, that's there's a lot of what I Hate sinking on the backside of that thing. I'm quite quite surprised.

Jeez, But look at whatever flux residue left over on those pins. That's pretty how you're doing for an Apple And they've got some cables coming through here. These are looks like they're coming from the power supply. they're going up to the hard drives and everything else up on the top.

so that's how they've got them across. It's rather nice is actually no dust. They're a little bit accumulated on some of the channels. The reason they got these plastic channels in there, they'd be yeah, some thermal ducting and this thing, as well as dust or awful.

Absolutely awful the dust in this thing. But um, there we go. We have an empty case. we can whack our apple pie motherboard straight back in.

and Bob's your uncle. Now the good thing about having this case for the project is that well, decision made. You work around the case you've got and that's so often I Found for various our projects worked on that you will, you know, choose a nice case for it and that will decide the form factor. It'll even sometimes decide the features and and the user interface and all sorts of stuff like that.

So you know, like choosing this and going right. I'm going to build into this it you've got a framework to work from and engineers work best when they're given. you know specifications to work from and in this case, yep, we know our motherboards going to be this big. Oh man.

and over here we got X amount of power we've got X amount of airflow, everything else X amount of thermals and whatnot. and we've got what's available on the front panel. For example, like this is all just, you know. solid aluminium here.

Um, no, this aluminium rubbish for you? Yes, yeah. I Maybe we could have like a take out the CD drive up here and have like a display. something like that. You could have like an LCD in there or something like that, or a whole bunch of leads.

You could do like a custom display board to show them all working cuz you can. You know you can have LEDs and stuff shining through here, but it's not. You know it's not the same. You know it's not nearly as good.

so maybe you know you can have some sort of LCD interface as on the back. We've already got our cutouts here so we could probably have our armed Ethernet exactly where it was before down here, so most likely the boards will. it was mounted on the other board wasn't under I'll get that in a second, but so it's going to be the right height. Everything else.

So why standard one point six millimeter thick board? You whack it in there. You wake your Ethernet Ethernet connector on there and it's going to line up so it'll be the master Ethernet interface the Rj11 down here. You can use that as a serial. You can break out some USBs or something if you wanted to do so.

Have a framework to work from. Well, bingo, you just go for it. I Mean now what we're going to do is get there and measure all the dimensions of everything. You can either work from the standoffs on here or work from the board.

It's probably easier to work from the board, you know, get a big metal rather and try and get a big metal rule in here and it doesn't fit for these standoffs. You can get them all from the PCB and we can do the slots in there for those arm ones where you know it slides in and I gets hold of that or you don't have to even put those in if you don't want to. If you don't want to, your fancy pantsy, you can just make a big cutout hole for those things and well, I Don't know. Yeah, we're not going to hook drives or anything like that up, but you know we could if we really want to do.

But this is quite exciting and from a thermal point of view, it's brilliant. We're going to have airflow got air flow right through the front here and blow it out the back. No worries. Now, of course you cannot reuse components as well.

For example, if you didn't want to go out and source and buy the power connector here, you could disorder it. You need a decent solder sucker because this is going to be a multi-layer board connected through two big round planes. It's probably going to have a thermal relieves on the pads, but anyway, you need a decent solder sucker. but you can get that puppy out and reuse it on your own board.

In bingo, You've got a matching power connector for it and so we've got two of those there. You know, if you didn't want this board, say it was faulty organi, you probably couldn't even sell this thing for five bucks on. eBay Could you I doubt it? Anyway, the cases. The thing that's worth all the money.

this motherboard is probably useless to almost anyone I stand to be corrected on that. Sorry for all you WA G5 Power Mac aficionados out there you go all have it. By the way, look at this. We have a genuine bodge wire loo.

That wire wrap wire gone all the way over there and I have no idea what that puppy is for. Hmm. Anyway, um yeah, they didn't want to reap in the board for that one so well it's just a moderate. no worries.

what the little heatsink there I Want to keep that? but that's not as big a goof as the woman that got up here. This is the power connector with the crusty flux residue soldering and obviously they're screwed up some are you know, star grounding type thing I would presume. And yeah, they brought it back to that bigger power resistor there. that would be a current shunt resistor.

You can I think you can see the two tracers going off there that would be going into Wei de vamp measuring the current presumably for this expansion connector. Check this out! I was taking this broken off here and look what we got in here in plastic to-220 package. just until you know can't just cable tied on there like that I can't quite see the part number on that. It's a 2n 3904.

well yet there it is. Wow I Thought that would have been like a little La temp sensor job' um it could still be. But why? they've actually put that transistor up there? Look, they've even gone to the effort to make a bloody connector for that like it wasn't using that as a heat sink. So wow, it's like why would you want to measure I mean you can actually use the PN Junction of a transistor If you want to measure temperature you know you get 10 millivolts per degree C I think or there abouts but like sticking like in the but they're not What? What did what? Whoo! look at all the dust still on there.

Yuck! Oh Anyway, here's our key slots and we can easily make those out how you would. Well you could either specify, you could do that two ways You specify either in the PCB I'm talking about you either specify like a drill like that so you specify a hole Wayne on plated hole and then you specify a slot I go in front which is a hole with a with the hora with a dimensional length on it. From that point through to the center of that one and we're in like Flynn on the power supply. Just our two screws here lift it off a metal cover, got two Krusty fans on the end there.

They really need a decent clean-out no doubt and unfortunately no pin out on the thing. Well, whatever. I'm 450 watt max capability. Now that sounds great, but that 450 watts of course capability is spread across all these different rails.

So and then look at total of 340 maximum on those. Now you know you could potentially get in there and try and you know, hack the thing and remodel cuz we only need the five volt output. Okay, because this thing's got a 3.3 volt output and you know it's we're basically going to be pissing away. 22 amps of the well times are three point three in what is the total capacity of this thing? So you know if we don't modify it in any way, we ever have to have an external DC to DC converter to use the power available in.

These are 12 volt ones and the 3.3 volt rail as well. Yeah, you wouldn't worry about the negative. rails of the stand I Stand by. You can get a little bit of power from the stand by once.

In fact, the standby would it come in handy. Maybe you could have like one Raspberry Pi in there working continuously off the standby and then only when you press the soft power do you one and I pair up all the others I don't know, you know, didn't I hadn't planned on anything like that I don't think I will, but you could hey, um, and 25 volts standby at 5.2 ants capability. Holy power availability Batman that's some insane what the hell do they need? Um, like a hundred and twenty five watts stand by for Wow I Don't get it. And there are some people say, well, you know you probably shouldn't use this power supply anyway because it's you know, too old.

at least going to recap it or something like that. Yeah, maybe you know that's a half reasonable argument, but for the time being I think I'll just use the thing because it does work. Now if we just look at the unmodified power supply with the 5 volt 19 M rail. that's 95 watts if my math is correct I'm not that good at math and the orange PI 1 I've measured at our 3.7 watts are nominal for all 4 cores running the Blink software at you know, a hundred percent.

So that gives us 25 boards. We can, you know, nominal we can power from the single 5 volt nineteen. AMP rail might be able to get a bit more juice out of that. but I Today you know this is going to be a decent power supply.

They're probably going to have our over current protection and all the rest of it I would be guessing and then you get like another twenty or so. maybe from the if you were able to or maybe less than that with conversion efficiency and stuff. If you had an external like an on board boost converter from three point three up to five mate, you know you could power some more boards. or you have a buck converter.

twelve volts at twenty three amps. That's where all most of the power on this baby goes. and you know. So if you're going to tap off something I would tap the twelve volts and take that down to five and then you can power as many boards as you want.

But your twenty five is not a huge number of boards for you know this huge monster case here and well, you know we want to want greater capability than that, right? So we're looking at you know, your standard Raspberry Pi or your orange pie one that I've got a few of these I've got the newer orange pie PC to on order it's just come out and it's got the new H five quad-core processor in it so it looks pretty jazzy and it's our twenty dollars. I think for the and it's got double the memory or one gig or something like that. Anyway, um, these boards are tiny compared to the space inside here. Now if you've watched the previous video and you should have, you know I Came up with some sort of slot arrangement to plug this in.

I Don't think I'll do that because it ties me to one particular type of board because as I said previously, while the pin out on the orange PI one is compatible with the Raspberry Pi 2 it's actually our backwards. They put it on backwards because the boards actually come out this. The expansion boards actually come out this way. So if you had an expansion board, it comes out like that instead of on the Raspberry Pi which is over the top like that.

So the pin outs actually backwards. So what I'll do is just design a simple vertical riser board. so the motherboard. So instead of this connector here, you know, slowly into the motherboard like this and then clipping onto a right angle connector on the motherboard.

I'll actually have it like this and then have a riser. Sorry for the crudity of the model here. I Didn't have time to build it. The scale order penis.

um then you imagine this is a blank are like let me get a blank board. Okay, so what you've got is a little large. Just design a custom our riser board like this that converts the vertical header on the Raspberry Pi or the orange PI into a right angle header basically. So then you can plug that into your motherboard like that.

So the Raspberry Pi one would have, say a small one like that and the orange PI one would have because it's well, you'd have to design it so it's upside-down like that actually. So you'd have to design this one with the short board like that that then plugged in and then the Raspberry Pi with the big one because the pin outs back to front and then the Raspberry Pi plugged into the motherboard like that if you get what I'm getting it. So the good thing about using a riser board plug-in like that is that you can use basically any board your motherboard will can be compatible. It'll use the standard Raspberry Pi header, but then that the physicality of actually loading the board on there and you know you have to do a slot and you've got a you know, not have connectors Fowle and all sorts of things.

It just you know it gives you options later for installing that so the width and then you don't lose any with the slot. You don't lose any space by plugging that in and then moving it over like that so you can just plug it in vertically so you can actually fairly densely pack these things like that because they're basically plugging in vertical and because you've got the large and the large connectors like that, the ethernet and the USB The header board is smaller than that, but you've got your right angle connector on there. It could be on the other side. Yeah, you know, work out the pinout arrangements later and you know everything else.

Um, yes, you should get about that much space between your boards. you've got to watch out your heatsink. Of course that could be an issue, but once you do that, then you can even mix and match different types of boards any ones you had in there. All you've got to do is design a little header.

Yeah, a little riser board to match whatever Raspberry Pi or other style board that you wanted to use on this thing. Now of course one of the big things on a supercomputer like a cluster II thing. high powered. Anything high powered like this.

just your regular PC Of course the airflow. The thermals of this are a big deal. Got the fans at the back they'd be blowing out so to be sucking in through the nice front grille. here.

who can see my hand look at that's beautiful. Love this case. It's pornographic really is. so you want a nice airflow with as little resistance and a little turbulence as possible in there.

So would you mount your Raspberry Pi boards like that? or like that. I'll give you a second to think about it. Of course you would mount them like this because then if you mount them like this you're blocking all the airflow coming through here with your damn boards. that's And then you're not getting good airflow over your heatsink as will glue a little with some thermal glue glue little heat sinks on these.

so you want to mount them in this direction like this. So you want to stack them like that so that the air flows over the heatsink. I Know you've got air flow issues caused by the I by the connectors and everything else, but hey, that's better than the entire board blocking like that because at least you got you know gaps between there and then you know it gap between each board. But if you put it like that, you're really restricting that airflow and the airflow it had.

Come in here like this and then flow around the board and you have this dead space in here you wouldn't get. you know, the air football. The airflow over your heatsink here would be horrid. So you want them in that direction like that.

So how many of these things can we fit? well? got I Bought one, two, three, four. Okay, so four across? Ah, you could space and say 30 apart. it's 250 hi so that'd round to like maybe eight of these. a one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight something like that.

Maybe you know to just give yourself some wiggle room. Everything else you know you might say I'll be generous and say forty. That would bring you down to six. So um, six fours? Ah well, you know Six Four is twenty-four Twenty-four Twenty-five Hmm.

Now of course we could gain some more space by just saying. Well, you know we're only get is going to design the thing around the orange pie one because it's much smaller than the raspberry pie. But you know, like I think compatibilities probably important mix-and-match board you know I might use the orange pie too one the Orange Play PC 2 I'm going to get so you know that's I think even bigger than the is it bigger than the orange pie one Anyway, yeah, you got a you know, sort of design it for the worst case biggest board so we could squeeze more in like this. I mean we're talking, you know, like 20 with the Raspberry Pi to either you know, up to maybe thirty two of these we can comfortably fit in this.

But the problem is, look, we're wasting all this space in here. We could at least get another depth like that. And that's where these riser boards come in. you riser board.

You can actually have two of them that plug vertically into your riser board and then you rise a board place horizontal horizontally over to here. And of course, you can supply your 5 volts power through the Raspberry Pi header from your riser board like this. but you can actually have two of them which then the plug in like that. but then you maybe you have to change the pin out over here.

couldn't use the standard Raspberry Pi one. Oh, you wouldn't have to wire them all the way through if you wanted to get say the serial and other ports out of their SPI and everything else out of these things. So you might have to have a custom header, a custom pin out on your riser board like that. or you could just have some extra pins or something like that.

So instead the 40 Way header you could use a slightly larger one that or a separate one actually next to it that you know had like a smaller number of breakout pins to share between the two boards if you wanted to stack them like that. so you know 32, we could probably get 64 Raspberry Pi regular raspberry PI's inside this thing without too much of a problem. Now the one thing I haven't decided on yet is whether or not I'm going to go for the SPI solution that I figured last time and do my own. you know SPI to Ethernet converter chip on there or whether or not I'd get you know because this case is all super high Powerful.

looks fancy pantsy. You know you got this thing sitting there I hear it's you know, got hundreds of ARM cores in it and you know they get piddly little um SPI bandwidth out of your Ethernet So I tempted to actually maybe have a little short Ethernet jumper for each one and then maybe he went next to each one of the boards. just have the ethernet cable coming out, but then if you but then you've got to decide whether or not you do what everyone else does with. there are clusters and they just use our existing house or switches like this one, you know and you can mount them up here.

of course there's no worries about that at all. You can mount a whole bunch of switches up there. oh well, yeah, you get what I'm getting at and then you can have all the cables coming out and you could loom and look all very impressive and stuff like that. So I could just copy and I do it as a copy out.

Do it. Do it that way. or but if you did it the other way, you know and you use the ethernet and you actually had vertical Rj45 s on your motherboard here coming out and then little short cables. you can actually buy premade little a couple of inch long Ethernet cables so you know you can use those and then you're going to have the magnetics on there.

You got a design basically this switch onto your board which is just a single-chip solution I Tore this apart last time, but you can design that on there. but then the the magnetics and everything else. Is it worthwhile for a one-off project? You'd almost say you're better off if you had the room actually buying these, stripping them down to board level and then just stick on that board onto your motherboard. In fact, you could even have this as like a vertical solution like that may even have short cables or vertical Somebody actually pointed out I Thought you couldn't get them, but someone actually posted a link to when you can actually get a vertical mail.

Rj45 Connector a PCB Mount Rj45 male. So in theory you could have you know eight of those on the board and just come along and go click. And in theory, um, you switch would just click into your board like that and it wouldn't into your motherboard and it wouldn't take up much room. So that's you know.

it's almost a sexy solution to actually do it that way. Um, so that you know, and then hands up. If you think maybe that would be the go to, put those are vertical male ones on there and you know you'd have to line them up proper. You'd have to make sure get all your dimensions precisely right.

so you've got eight of them mounted on your board and just go click. I Mean and then all you got to do is wire up the DC jack here so that would be okay. That might be kind of Jersey But hmm so yeah, there's lots to decide on here. I Want to do the motherboard? of course, lay out the motherboard.

so the next step will be to get all the dimensions, measure it, lay out the motherboard, and then start planning. often. when you've got that template yeah, that PCB template in your in your CAD software, then you know you start playing around with modules and see how they fit in. You know, like then you start sort of.

You know you could even do like a paper or a cardboard mock-up like this. so you can actually like. Once you've done all your dimensions, put in your piece of a CAD file, print it out and then often I've done this before is I. You know I'll print on your big A3 sheet of paper in a one-to-one scale for my piece of B and then I'll just get some glue, stick that paper onto our cardboard just so it's a bit more rigid.

and then I've actually got a real mock-up board to actually play with inside this thing. and then you can start coming along. and you know, seeing exactly you know, start refining how many boards you can fit in. but then you know you've got your thermal trade-offs.

As I said, you know, 95 watts we can only offer thee without modifying this supply. we're only going to be able to probably get you know power 25 boards or there abouts. you know, if we wanted to tap in to more power we're going to have to have on board DC to DC converters. Whether or not you design those on the boarder, you buy the expensive little bricks that you can you know plug in.

So if cost is no object I wouldn't roll my own DC to DC for that I Just you know, buy more. You can just buy them on Le. You know you can get cheap one so you don't have to buy the TI power modules that you know cost. you know, one twenty or thirty bucks each or something like that.

you can just maybe get them on. you know, Aliexpress or something like that and just you know they're They're going to be probably good enough to do the job and you know, have some my power bricks on there because you wouldn't have just one I would if I was going to tap into that twelve volt rail there I'd probably have maybe a power brick per depending on what one I got. you know it feels like a fat or a geez, don't even add up. Multiply that by two, then you might have one of those / -.

But then if you had, huh? then if you had the jewel board riser like that, then you'd have to dedicate one of those power bricks you know, a 10.8 watt power brick or whatever to each one of those. - And then you have to have the power brick next to it so that's taking up more room. and there's massive trade Oscar law in this thing. So yeah, we've decided on our case, but you know we've got a whole bunch of new problems anyway.

um I just wanted to show you this that I thought I'd use this very cool and sexy looking G5 Power Mac case because they are incredibly good-looking I'm a in wipe this thing be the Ducks guts with the Apple logo on there. Of course we'll add the Raspberry Pi in the middle so it'll be an apple pie cluster and it'll look very very sexy will it not? So anyway I want people's our feedback on this puppy of it? You know what do you think? it's the best arrangement? best solution, especially in terms of you know, a off-the-shelf switch? maybe that plug-in one? or maybe put them up here and just didn't be. You know, just do it easy, run the cables or or whatever and do it that way. So yeah, let me know your opinion down below in the YouTube comments on the blog or on the Eevee blog forum.

Anyway, it's a very sexy case. Catch you next time you.