I have realized that a lot of people nowadays self-host services and set up home labs with mini racks.

One major pain point I have come across personally is to quickly get health status from self-hosted services and machines, and have the ability to headlessly control my Raspberry Pi inside a mini rack.

So It got me thinking about building a built-in GUI that users can easily add to their Raspberry Pi nodes in their (mini or full) racks or elsewhere.

I have previously designed this GUI for an open source project I have been working on (called Ubo pod: github.com/ubopod) and decided to detach/decouple the GUI into its own standalone module for this use case.

The GUI allows headless control of your Raspberry Pi, monitoring of system resources, and application status.

I am designing a new PCB and enclosure as part of this re-design to allow for a new form factor that mounts on server racks.

I am recording my journey of re-designing this and I would love to get early feedback from users to better understand what they may need or require from such a solution, specially on the hardware side.

The software behind the GUI is quite mature (https://github.com/ubopod/ubo_app) and you can actually try it right now without the hardware inside the web browser as shown in the video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ob_HDO66_8

All PCB designs are available here:

https://github.com/ubopod/ubo-pcb

cool idea, had no idea people used tiny racks like that

some more context on this github issue: https://github.com/geerlingguy/mini-rack/issues/229