Show HN: Open-source physical rack-mounted GUI for home lab
getubo.comThis article explores the use of a Graphical User Interface (GUI) on a Raspberry Pi device housed within a mini-rack. It discusses the advantages of this setup, such as the compact size and improved organization, as well as the steps involved in implementing the GUI on the Raspberry Pi inside the mini-rack.
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: