Every adventure starts with a story. This story tells of three nano pi neo sbc's found in my desk drawer collecting dust for a couple years. I purchased the boards back around 2018 and never found a use for them until now!
I decided that this would be the year I do something with them, and so begins the adventure!
The first step was to purchase cases for each board, which I found on AliExpress. The cost was approximately $10, which is close to the cost of the devices when I purchased them in 2018. Here is a direct link to the site where I purchased them in case you have some of these devices.
Introducing the Nano PI Neo
The device itself has modest resources. 4 cores for the CPU, 64GB of SD card storage and 512MB of RAM. Each device is running Debian Linux (bookworm) and uses about 190MB when sitting idle. The temperature of the CPU is sitting around 38~39c
More information about the board can be found here NanoPi_NEO
Why the Nano PI Neo? Why not a PI?
i'll answer this question, by asking another one.. why would i purchase new PI's when i have these languishing in my drawer of broken hopes and dreams? time for these devices to serve some purpose and i was looking for something low power and could run off batteries with the need for lugging around separate power supplies. these work off microusb due to their age, which isn't ideal, but not a deal breaker either. i decided to recycle these into a micro-cluster mostly due to cost and see what software i could get running on three of these devices. luckly i hit paydirt with the debian cache and found many applications which run just fine on these devices. this vibe coded blog is an example of that software!
What about power usage?
Power usage of three of these devices and a travel router comes in at about 8~9 watts which i can easily run a small lab on a 25000 Mah battery for at least 10+ hours. the idea is to have the minilab on battery when necessary while i'm between readible power delivery. i have multiple batteries available to be used including the following:
UGREEN-25000mAh-Portable-Charger
INIU-20000mAh-Charging-Portable-Powerbank
Both power banks are pretty good, although each has their issues. namely with the ugreen the last 20% of the battery definitely hits zero alot faster than the first 20% of the battery from 100% to 80%. not a deal breaker but something to look out for. the iniu have a weird issue where they often display 100% or 0%.. but fully charge, just difficult to determine what battery you have left.
each battery is capable of powering all three SBC's + the travel router for approximately 10+ hours. you can see an image of the ugreen battery in use in the extra images below.
Wait, did you say travel router.. explain please!
Well i need a way to cluster the nano pi neos and all i need are three ports.. and i need it to be powered over usb-c.. enter the Glinet Slate AX (AX-1800) travel router
slate-ax-gl-axt1800-gigabit-wireless-router
The web interface is pretty easy to navigate around and investigate the feature sets..
here i show the status screen with my three nodes connected. the repeater part is as you would expect, acts as a wifi client to my home wifi as a gateway.
one of the features of this router is tailscale integration, so it allows me to add the router network to my tailnet. this is just awesome as it can access ANY system in my tailnet which includes my existing homelab.
to be continued...
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