Meet Xerxes Pi, your inexpensive home lab blade server

Hi everyone, I’m Rob, and I have a completely under-control, very reasonable addiction to small single board computers.

It all began in the 1990s when I worked as a student assistant in my university IT department. I didn’t collect stamps or coins, I collected cables, mysterious adapters, and hard drives that clicked ominously but “might still work.” I’d Frankenstein these parts together into creations best described as Franken-Seagate-RAID-esque, powered mostly by hope and zip ties. Despite my love of hardware chaos, I stayed loyal to software… for a while.

Fast forward a few decades and my garage had become an assisted living facility for retired computers. Loud ones. Hot ones. Power-hungry ones. Home automation boxes that refused to talk to each other unless Mercury was in retrograde. Wires everywhere. Fans screaming. Power bricks breeding when I wasn’t looking. I finally snapped.

I wanted neat, quiet, low-power machines that fit cleanly into a mini rack. I wanted PoE, M.2, NVMe, optional AI acceleration, and the freedom to choose RAM and CPU power without running a data centre or a power station. I searched. I failed. So naturally, I built my own.

That’s how the Xerxes Pi was born. It’s based on the Raspberry Pi compute architecture, so it supports multiple third-party compute modules at different prices and RAM sizes. It runs over Power over Ethernet (goodbye power bricks), has an M.2 M-Key slot for NVMe or AI accelerators, and finally brings some order to the chaos.

Best of all, I made it affordable at just $59 Australian dollary-doos (which, depending on your exchange rate, is basically loose change). And for a limited time, you can use the code for an extra 10% off:

THEHUNT26

Your server closet will thank you.