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Blog Building a Render Farm with a Bitscope Blade Quatro - Plan of action
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  • Author Author: Workshopshed
  • Date Created: 20 Dec 2016 1:22 PM Date Created
  • Views 1477 views
  • Likes 9 likes
  • Comments 5 comments
  • cluster
  • rpiexpert
  • raspberry_pi_projects
  • blender
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Building a Render Farm with a Bitscope Blade Quatro - Plan of action

Workshopshed
Workshopshed
20 Dec 2016

The Bitscope Blade is from the same people who make the Bitscope Oscilloscope & Analyzer tools. It's a host board that allows you to host one to four raspberry Pi and provides power and connectivity. You can stack a series of blades into a chassis and power these from a shared supply.

44-FB26K-02.jpg

Here's Bruce from Bitscope describing it in more detail.

 

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BitScope Blade Power & Mounting Solutions for Raspberry Pi

 

Render farm Overview

Element14 invited me to take a look at these blades so I started by reading the above page. One of the suggestions was for a render farm for the open source 3D modelling and animation package blender. This seemed like a great way to prove out the system in a real-world scenario.

 

My farm will consist of 4 Pi with one acting as a controller node. That will connect to the USB external disk and have a secondary network connection (possibly wifi) so I can copy the files to be rendered and download any packages needed.

 

 

image

 

The are four key elements in a render farm:

  • Power
  • Network
  • Shared Storage
  • Configuration management

 

Power

The BitScope Blade provides the power to the Pi via the 40way sockets. The blade has a beefy switch mode power supply in the form of an LM2576HVLM2576HV and a few discrete components which can provide 3A for the Pi and any accessories. The supply can take anything from 9v to 48v as an input. There are some big capacitors to handle any rush of current when starting up. I hope to power the external disk from the same supply but I do have the option of powering that independently if required. I'll likely use a spare 1U ATX power supply to provide power to the blade and router as I can grab 12V of that for both of them.

 

Network

The network will be connected up with Cat 5e cables and an old 10/100 router.

 

Shared Storage

The control node will connect to a USB disk which will be shared over the network.

 

Configuration management

For four nodes the configuration of the nodes is straightforward and can be done manually, for a larger system you'd need to consider how configuration and monitoring can be automated. Some script files will likely be used to help with that.

 

Setup

The next post in this series will look at how I setup the hardware.

 

Building a Render Farm with a Bitscope Blade Quatro - Hardware

Building a Render Farm with a Bitscope Blade Quatro - Pins

Building a Render Farm with a Bitscope Blade Quatro - Setup of the controller

Building a Render Farm with a Bitscope Blade Quatro - Setup of the nodes

Building a Render Farm with a Bitscope Blade Quatro - Running Blender

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Top Comments

  • Jan Cumps
    Jan Cumps over 8 years ago +6
    Being xmas season, I thought you had made a reindeer farm....
  • balearicdynamics
    balearicdynamics over 8 years ago +3
    In my opinion this project is reliable and can give good results, better than the Pi cloud. It is the worth to follow it. Enrico
  • petergloor
    petergloor over 8 years ago +1
    Nice product and interesting use case. As a user of Blender I'm looking forward to your next post in the series.
  • Workshopshed
    Workshopshed over 8 years ago in reply to petergloor

    If you have any test animations then let me know.

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  • Workshopshed
    Workshopshed over 8 years ago in reply to petergloor

    Have been getting all the bits together, slow progress over the holidays but might squeeze another post in before the year is out.

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  • petergloor
    petergloor over 8 years ago

    Nice product and interesting use case. As a user of Blender I'm looking forward to your next post in the series.

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  • balearicdynamics
    balearicdynamics over 8 years ago

    In my opinion this project is reliable and can give good results, better than the Pi cloud. It is the worth to follow it.

     

    Enrico

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  • Jan Cumps
    Jan Cumps over 8 years ago

    Being xmas season, I thought you had made a reindeer farm....

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