Overview of the Raspberry Pi Cluster

Now I have the power supply and built the stacking system I can show off the clusters initial state.

Every Raspberry Pi in the cluster

Here are the 7 initial Pi’s that are to become part of the cluster. Each have been given a codename to designate its position in the cluster. The Raspberry Pi designed “M” will be the initial master Raspberry Pi as this is a Raspberry Pi 1 B+. Nodes 1 to 4 are all Raspberry Pi 1 revision 1.2 (512 MB version). The unlabelled one with the blue SD card is “chewpi” the original Raspberry Pi I have been using. This is again a Raspberry Pi revision 1.2 (512 MB). The final node, Node 5, is an original Raspberry Pi 1 (256 MB) which wont sit in the cluster stack but will be joined eventually.

Shots of casing assembly

Here you can see the master node sitting in its casing. I have decided to mount this one at the top for ease of accessing its USB ports.

Here you can see the modifications to the casing means that I am able to easily stack the older Raspberry Pi’s with the newer ones with the mounting holes. I described how to modify the case in an earlier post.

The open sides of the case should allow for good ventilation as when the Raspberry Pi’s are running they are expected to generate some heat.

Here the final cluster sits in all its glory. In this configuration all the needed ports (power, USB and Ethernet) are accessible out the side of the case. If I want to access some of the GPIO ports I may convert the cluster into several stacks of 2 or 3. However I wont be doing this initially as this suites current my purposes fine.