POE Hack for UCTRONICS 1U Pi Rack

Updated modular version here: UPDATED: POE HACK FOR UCTRONICS 1U PI RACK

Recently I have been on a kick to organize my home server rack, to remove some wires I bought a few LoveRPi PoE hats for my Raspberry Pi’s but found that wasn’t really good enough on the look I was going for. Searching around I had found UCTRONICS Ultimate Rack for Raspberry Pi 4, 19″ 1U Rackmount with All IO on One Side, OLED Display, Power Switch, and Cooling Fan on Amazon.com and thought that was just what I was looking for. While looking at the images I could see that it didn’t provide enough room for the PoE hats that I had purchased and found the comments confirming as much. Fortunately this didn’t scare me off because I am used to making modifications to make hardware work for me.

Let’s get the warning out of the way, if you don’t know what you are doing or do not understand the instructions, please do not try this at home. You are dealing with power, power tools and can brick, break or burn down your equipment. This just a blog post of what I have done myself with over 27 years of experience with hardware hacking and I am in no way liable for any modifications that you do to mimmic or copy my actions.

I used the following tools:

1. Solder
2. Solder Iron
3. Desolder bulb or wire if required
4. Phillips screw driver
5. Dremel
6. Multimeter

At this point, make sure as a double check that nothing is jumping the pins together and use a multimeter to confirm.

Put everything back together and test out your new setup.

If you need a pinout of the Raspberry Pi, you can use this site simple-guide-to-the-rpi-gpio-header-and-pins

Simple modification that takes little effort and is sure to impress in any PoE rack. I would like to change this to just desolder the pins from the pi and solder longer pins up trough both hats but I don’t have any on hand and as you can see this does the trick as needed. I will add photos of the rest of the unit once I have purchased the next two Raspberry Pi 4s.

Update: I will be posting another story with the more proper way to make this modification around April 10th. The plan is to use these 20mm header pins to replace the 8 pins (1-8) on the Raspberry Pi but they aren’t scheduled to be delivered until 4/8. The idea is to remove the 6 pin PoE header cap, keep the header pin clips on, desolder the header raiser from the UCTRONICS hat and clip it down to shorten the female end to the hat directly. Don’t get me wrong, the two Pi 4s, using the above method works just fine and this was designed so we wouldn’t have to buy any extra parts. Since I am ordering two new 8GB Pi’s to fill out the space on the rack mount, I figured we should improve upon the design with a $12 part, this will allow all three pieces to be detached and the Pi will just have 8 longer headers in the back if repurposed.

Update 4/1/2021: The new post of the proper way to make this modification is published at Updated: POE Hack for UCTRONICS 1U Pi Rack

I am not paid, sponsored by, invested in or even remotely related to the linked sites, products or companies listed in this article. This is a blog post and honest recommendations of sites and/or products that I have used and documented to help everyone in our community.