He was updating my personal home “pico data center” in order to get more processing power (swarm cluster) and arrange all my ARM based servers in a cabinet.

He wanted to use only on power supply for all my servers (mostly arm based) instead of multiple 5v power adapters. I also had some 12v needs for my router and my NAS running an Odroid N1 (more to come about it in a future article…)

So He built a custom 1U rackable smart power which provides some remote services through HTTP…

Features

The smart power actually has the following features :

• 5V 20A capacity
• 12V 8.5A capacity
• 6 USB connectors for 5V supply
• 2 Barrel connectors for 12V supply
• One temperature sensor
• Live display of power consumption and temperature
• Hardware switch to turn on or off any of the 8 power connectors
• “Cold” power-on sequence for all connectors (eg. turn on servers in the right order)
• Gather temperature and consumption history through REST API (json)
• Toggle any connector’s status thought HTTP command

Below a photo of the smartpower in action on my 19 inches cabinet: