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Rackmounts for Musicians?
williwilli asks: "Musicians face a multitude of challenges in this day and age, yet there are a number of musicians also trying to work towards the future. One constant challenge in almost any profession in money. With CPU's continuing to advance at a rapid rate, many musicians are finding computer-based software synthesis to be much more cost effective than traditional hardware synthesizers. While some musicians are using portable systems, the lack of expandibility limits the systems capabilities in terms of synthesis, multitrack recording, etc. While one could always throw more computers at the problem, many users will no doubt find a rackmount system provides much more capability and expandibility. As such, what insights might the Slashdot crowd be able to provide towards building your own rack? Is shockmounting necessary? Are parts readily available, or are there any 'open-source' CAD files out there? Are there music-specific materials, designs, or tips to recommend or avoid?" Would rackmounts for a mobile musician really differ so greatly from rackmounts made for a small server cluster?
The K5 piece has a number of useful responses.
A while back, I needed rack specs, and had a bitch of a time finding them, so after I found them, I whipped up some layouts. Here's a PNG showing dimensions for everything; it'll render at true size on 72dpi monitors.
;)
Linky
I've got a 300dpi version, but no way am I posting that on Slashdot. And no, it's not rackspecs300dpi.png.
Hey Taco! Looks like you're using the "infinite monkeys and typewriters" scheme to generate Ask Slashdots again...
First, I wouldn't build the rack myself. I would buy a good prebuilt one like an Anvil or SKB (Musicians Friend has an SKB 6-space for $70 right now).
From there, you can either buy a good rackmaount PC chassis, which will be expensive, or you can modify a standard case to mount in a rack. If you can pick up a tower that's just under 19" tall that should work. You can find raw materials for the bracketry at your local hardware store, or you can look up a local small machine shop and work with them. Small machine shops are great, because they usually have very knowledgable machinists who can be a great help if you don't really know what you're doing.
Of course, if you're going to spend that kind of money you can just buy a rackmount case. Kontron has some nice ones that will accept an ATX motherboard, but they start around $800. I'm not sure what kind of shock-mounting the ATX ones have. I've only used their backplane-based systems, but those are pretty good. You'd probably be looking at something like the 4-space Omnix 400 series to accomodate your PCI cards. With a 6-space rack that leaves a little storage space to pack your keyboard, mouse, cables, etc.
Regardless of what case solution you go with, you are definately going to want something more than just a single screw holding your peripheral cards in. If you go with a modified standard case that will mean constucting some sort of custom bracket to hold the other end of the card down. An industrial chassis like you'd get from Kontron should already be set up for that.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
You betcha, well, that is if your roadie is gonna toss your rack like he is gonna toss your Marshal quad. Solid-state == fragile-state, just think of your hdd platters :-)
I figured it would be the topmost piece of hardware in the rack, so it wouldn't have to be on rails but can still remain horizontal.