The DeskPi 2U Case: A Purpose-Built Home for the Cruiser

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Cruiser is a Mini-ITX board, but it’s not a typical one. With 8 PoE+ ports, dual SATA, 2.5GbE uplink, HDMI, USB, and barrel jack power, there’s more IO on it than any standard ITX case was designed to accommodate.

DeskPi saw that as a design opportunity.

Their 2U Mini Rack Mount Case is built specifically for the Cruiser. It’s compact, rack-mountable, and has cutouts in all the right places. The front panel exposes the ports through a wide IO opening and locks in two Dell R720-style drive sleds. The whole thing drops into a desktop mini rack or sits on a shelf.

The Cruiser and the Mini Rack: One Board to Run It All

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A typical mini-rack lab looks something like this:

A Raspberry Pi running Home Assistant. A PoE switch next to it to power everything else. Two power supplies. A handful of cables. It works, but it’s two devices doing a job one device could do.

The Exaviz Cruiser flips that around. The PoE switch is built into the board. You get 8 ports of PoE+ (expandable to 16), a CM5 running your stack, NVMe storage, and 2.5GbE uplink, all in one Mini-ITX form factor. There is no separate switch.

Lab on exaviz encyclopedia

The DeskPi 2U Case: A Purpose-Built Home for the Cruiser

The Cruiser and the Mini Rack: One Board to Run It All