Whoops, I had one side threaded the other not, which I noticed when I attempted to attach the rear to the sides. I installed both sides to the bottom panel. Got out my tools, my little container of thread lock liquid (I learned a long time ago always use thread lock liquid when assembling things you want to stay permanently together) and began the assembly. Not that I paid any attention to this before I started. It came with no hints on how to put the case together but how hard can it be? It has 2 handles, 2 slides, 2 sides, a front, back, top and bottom panel right? Well turns out it’s a tad more complex then that: The side panels are threaded on one end and have through holes at the other end the top and bottom panels have one edge bent up at a 90 degree angle and the other end has 3 threaded screw holes instead of the bent angle. It’s pretty cool but caught me off-guard. Everything I asked for is where I asked for it to be, I just have to do the final assembly. It’s a do-it-yourself case, which I guess sort of fits this project as it’s a do-it-yourself cluster of ARM boards. Oh I get it, it’s a flat pack like when you buy furniture from IKEA. What I actually see is a bunch of loose metal pieces, some nuts and bolts and 3 fans. I open the box and look inside expecting to see a 4U (rack Units or 7″) high, 27″ long 19″ wide rack mount case. It is the custom case for the Ubuntu ARM build cluster. Yea, back from UDS one day and Fedex showed up at my door with a large box in hand. Still I think it is going to be better then the original design with the daughter cards. Nice, 4 hours rearranging stuff, drawing templates, 2 hours machine and mounting. Couple hours or so later, everything mounted cleanly. Lots of drilling and then filing to remove burrs. I made up templates of each item, put locater holes in each template and then took the side off the case and out to the drill press we go. With lots of moving things around in the box I finally arrived at mounting all three items on the side of the case, looking at it from the front everything is mounted on the right hand side of the case. That space was supposed to hold the large regulated 5VDC power supply, the 12VDC power supply and the remote control relay board. That was a success but as you can well imagine it took up a lot of unplanned space. With the dropping of the daughter card, I had to mount all of the HD’s in external SATA to USB containers, and then make mounts to hold all of them. With the original design each Panda daughter card mounted the laptop sized HD directly on it. It was a fun day, trying to lay out the Panda server cluster again.
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