Rob Newport's Xerxes Home Lab Blade-ifies Raspberry Pi CM5, NVIDIA Jetson COMs for Neat Clusters

What happened

Engineer and computational neuroscientist Rob Newport has opened crowdfunding for a blade-style home lab setup compatible with the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5, NVIDIA Jetson Nano, and other computers-on-modules (COMs): the Xerxes Home Lab. 3D-printable racks let you set up six- or 12-node home labs with ease, Newport promises. NVIDIA is a semiconductor company based in Santa Clara.

"The Xerxes Home Lab is a private, affordable, and compatible hardware platform for home lab engineers of all backgrounds," Newport claims of his creation. The heart of the Xerxes system is its blade-format nodes.

If you pick up the Raspberry Pi-flavored blade, you also get an expansion connector for optional mezzanine cards that brings out MIPI Camera Serial Interface (CSI) and HDMI display connectivity. The NVIDIA Jetson version, meanwhile, comes with an OCuLink expansion port carrying PCI Express signals.