Michael Klements built this 5-inch Raspberry Pi based lab rack by scaling down his actual lab rack by 50%, making it eight times smaller while preserving full rack-mount functionality. 3D printed using just 220g of filament with precision M3 brass inserts and screws, this portable homelab fits in your backpack yet powers a complete network stack. The setup includes an OpenWrt router running on a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 for firewall, DHCP and DNS management; a stripped-down 5-port Gigabit switch; a Raspberry Pi 5 NAS with NVMe SSD storage, an OLED stats display, and automated backups; along with a Docker-enabled Raspberry Pi 5 hosting Grafana monitoring dashboards.
What makes this project shine for makers is its real-world versatility. Whether you're setting up offline media servers, travel-ready Pi clusters, or secure homelabs on the go, it delivers professional-grade performance. The design maintains the satisfying rack-mount aesthetics while optimizing for efficiency. The technical ingenuity lies in its space-efficient engineering—custom rails and bays that mimic enterprise racks but at a fraction of the size and cost.
Components like the NVMe-equipped Pi 5 NAS handle high-speed data throughput for media streaming or backups while the OpenWrt router enables advanced networking capabilities. Grafana integration provides real-time visualizations of CPU, storage and network metrics. This level of integration showcases how 3D printing enables compact, high-performance hardware stacks for embedded AI, edge computing or remote experimentation. Shoutout to Michael Klements for sharing the full build files on MakerWorld.
