hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr2724.txt

Episode: 2724
Title: HPR2724: Using a DIN Rail to mount a Raspberry Pi
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2724/hpr2724.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 15:41:26

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This is HPR episode 2007-124 entitled, using a DIN rail to mount a Raspberry Pi.
It is hosted by Dave Morris and is about 9 minutes long and carries an explicit flag.
The summary is, I created DIN rail fittings for attaching my RPI-3B Plus and an SSD disk.
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Hello everybody. Welcome to Hacker Public Radio. This is Dave Morris.
Today I want to do a brief show about setting up a Raspberry Pi. I've got a Raspberry Pi 3B Plus,
which I want to use as a server. I was looking for a better way of setting it up,
because I want to put an SSD on it. It would be quite nice to stack them on top of the other in
some sort of way, but I came across the concept of using a DIN rail, DIN rail, and thought I would
see what could be done in that regard. So this is just talking about the investigations that I went
through and what I came up with. There's a bunch of photos in these notes and long notes to give
you some idea of what I'm talking about. So if you've never come across this so-called DIN
at DIN, which is one of the European standards, doichers, industry, norm or something it is,
but it's a standard for a particular type of rail. I think there's maybe three different types.
It's a metal rail, which you can fix to various surfaces or whatever. The idea for it is that you
can mount usually bits of electrical equipment onto it, which you then put into an equipment rack
and use whatever purpose. So you might find them in buildings controlling the power to the building
or phone systems, I think, and you can see them in factories and that type of thing where a machine
is controlled by equipment sitting on a DIN rail. You'll find if you realize what they are,
you'll see them everywhere I certainly have. I think I've got some in my house which are holding
circuit brackets for my electrical system. Anyway, there's a Wikipedia article that talks a lot
about it and I've put a link to it in the notes. Now a number of people in the maker community have
made use of these DIN rails and there's a number of designs for stands that can be 3D
printed. So that was the route I went to. There are also designs for mounts that you can put onto
the rail so you can hold a Raspberry Pi in discs and various other things. Quite a lot of things you
could fit onto a DIN rail. And it's not hugely difficult to come up with your own designs, I think,
though I haven't done that. So I just wanted to tell you about making the bits to set up a DIN rail,
put my Raspberry Pi and a disc on it. I had the help of my son and his girlfriend are both very
heavily into the 3D printing stuff and I had it did a show a while ago about the 3D printer that I
bought during 2018. So there are three different designs of DIN rail but the commonest one that you
mostly see is called the top hat design because from side view it looks like it's got the shape
of a hat. There's one with a depth of 7.5mm and the other is 15mm. I think the one that's
most commonly available is a 7.5mm and I went looking on eBay and Amazon and found them there so I
ordered a few short links. There's a couple of photos of what they look like in the notes. It's just
a flat rail with raised edges that form sort of a U shape when you look at it from the side. It's got
mounting holes and this sort of stuff. Just a metal rail. So I went looking for a stand because the
idea was to stand the rail. Put the rail between a couple of stands. Possibly more. I don't know,
but start off with a couple of stands and have it mounted on a surface tabletop shelf or something
like that. The first design I came up with was a bit too fragile and unstable. It's one of these things
not being an engineer myself. I couldn't quite visualize what it was going to be like when I saw
the design. We printed a couple of them. They came off thinny version. There's a link to it if you're
interested. It's a triangular shape with the din rail mounted. Well I just mounted it on one side
but you can mount one on each side which might be slightly better but it still seems to be quite a
thin design and not very rigid and I'm not sure that if you did have two din rails and put a fair
amount of equipment on it whether it'd be up to holding it up. So I wasn't happy with it. There's
a picture of what it looks like. Found a better design on Thingiverse again and this had the drawback
that it was designed for the 15mm top hat rail. We didn't appreciate this when we saw it and printed it.
I say we, I didn't appreciate it because I said how about this one and the guy said oh okay we
realised the mistake when the thing was printed and realised that it would not suit the 7.5mm
rail. So the symbolizer was to print a shim which was just based on the geometry of the top
of the stand with holding it for mounting bolts and stuff. So put that in as in the gap between the
7.5mm depth of the rail and the back of the stand and this picture of this showing the rail mounted
on one of the stands you can see the shim. The other thing we needed to do was to make mounting
plates or mounting units for bits of equipment to put onto the rail. So we printed one for the
Raspberry Pi 3B Plus and another one for the SSD disk. It came from the source, the first source,
I've got links to these so I'm just calling them the first source and stuff and the one that
didn't produce very nice stands. The actual fittings for hanging onto the rail are great. The idea
is that there's a hook at the top that goes over the top lip of the din rail and then the bottom of it
is secured with a locking tab that you slide into to a slot and push it up and it's held by
by friction and image 9 in my list of images shows sort of back of you of how this this looks
together. But the mounting plate for the Raspberry Pi is just screwed through. It's just a couple
of arms which protrude out from the part that hooks over to the rail, over the rail and it's got
holes in it to allow bolts to be placed through to fix the Raspberry Pi. There's a couple of pictures
here that show it in position. I have a bunch of nylon bolts which I've bought in the past to use
for fixing Raspberry Pi's to things and that's what I used a bit longer than they need to be but they
do the job fine. The similar one for an SSD, I bought one of the low price SSDs of Amazon, only 120
gigabytes but that should be enough for what I'm planning for and you can see that it's a similar
sort of idea. It's a slightly more elegant design actually, got sort of curves in it. You can
get some idea from these pictures that we were still learning away around this 3D printer so
the end result is not quite as pretty as perhaps we we could do now. Getting these things set up
is quite an exercise but it does the job great and I just happen to have a bunch of the
connectors that will screw into the bolts that will screw into the tapped holes on the back of an
SSD. Picture 9 shows the locking tabs on the rail. So the final picture shows the rail on
it stands. It's very nice and solid and stable. It's got equipment mounted on it. There's quite a
lot of room for for more. I think I get one or two more pies on there and I'm not sure how stable
it would be with a lot of stuff on but it looks quite well balanced so I think it would be fine.
The setup I've got is the Raspberry Pi where the USB ports are pointing upwards and the ethernet
connector and next to it is the SSD which is connected with the USB to SATA connector. I've
routed the power lead around the back of the rail for this particular one. It would be nice to do
something better in terms of power distribution but that's for another day but this this is going
to be really good and especially since I can get several pies on here if I want more and I do
have several around the house that are doing various jobs so you know things that think something
like this for mounting them properly. There's plenty of ventilation around it. The only downside
is going to be that if stuff gets dusty dust it's going to go into some of these USB connectors
and it's going to be all over the pie whereas when it's in a box it's lesser an issue but I think
this will be this will be pretty good anyway. I'm not sure I would put a spinning disc on this
because it's not as rock solid as putting it straight onto a desk would be. The other thing I'm
not sure about is whether I need to drill mounting holes in the bottom of the stand to fix it down
to to some surface but that's that's for the future. I hope you found that to be interesting
and it might convince you to go in a similar direction. Okay then bye!
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