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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Pimp my Red (Rocket) cart...

C.H.Haskell said:
Damn I did not want to hear that, I can get a new LTO4 deck for that price. Yes from what I understand they are damn good.
Click to expand...

That is a big part of why I built my own cart. Plus I got exactly what I wanted. I spent a lot of money on little accessories though. All the shock mounts for the 19" racks and stuff like that adds up. Plus the Switchcraft stuff.


Mark Gilmer said:
Dustin, that cart is badass. Any thought on producing/selling them?
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I could build a cart if someone was interested. Let me know.


Dusty
 
C.H.Haskell said:
Damn I did not want to hear that, I can get a new LTO4 deck for that price. Yes from what I understand they are damn good.
Click to expand...

When I spoke to them, they were talking about a pretty basic cart with the MacPro tray, and some RU space above, and one side flip-out shelf. They ballparked me a quote of $2600-$3000. WAY overpriced for me.

If you don't have the skill or other resources to build a cart yourself like some have, I also recommend 80/20's stuff. My modular cart is built of their stuff, and you can do pretty much everything BigFoot does with 80/20's extruded aluminum profiles and accessories. In fact in some of the photos I've seen of custom Bigfoot carts, I've seen some of 80/20's stuff mounted as accessories.

And all those nice articulated arms for monitors on their carts are from Ergotron, which you can get much cheaper on Amazon.
 
Chris,
Can you post some pics?? I'm working up a plan for an 80/20 cart right now.
 
I'm thinking to use 80/20 for a dit station and a monitor cart.
I'm wondering if the structure is strong enough to be used as a camera cart.

Do you think we can make a camera cart collapsible with 8020 for less than 1000$ ??
 
Joe,

I'm investigating those questions right now. I really like Dustin's cart a lot...I just have to build something custom to fit my truck and my gear and I think that the 80/20 stuff will allow a very customizable cart, if it can be done at a reasonable price.
 
I planned on making a Bosch aluminum extrusion rack mount cart but never got around to it, I bought a double sided 22U rack flight case instead.
 
Joe Hell said:
I'm thinking to use 80/20 for a dit station and a monitor cart.
I'm wondering if the structure is strong enough to be used as a camera cart.

Do you think we can make a camera cart collapsible with 8020 for less than 1000$ ??
Click to expand...

Totally depends I'd say. Making it collapsable is probably going to push you over the top as far as I could guess, but it really depends on the materials and hardware you use beyond the aluminum extrusions. They make the extrusions in both metric and fractional (SAE) profiles, so I doubt you'd be able to NOT find one of suitable strength, cause people use this stuff to build stairways and catwalks, machine frames, etc.

Bad thing is even though I'm a customer, I don't have a price list and have never even seen one, but I'd say you could probably build a DIT cart comparable to BigFoot's for 50-60% the cost.
 
Tim Wilkinson said:
Chris,
Can you post some pics?? I'm working up a plan for an 80/20 cart right now.
Click to expand...

Here are some pictures of my cart.

The cart is made of 80/20's 25mm profile, the black panels in the upper section are just cheap-o PVC. The silver panels in the lower section are a composite panel of corrugated plastic sandwiched between two thin layers of aluminum. VERY lightweight, stiff and strong. The tabletop is a solid piece of .25" aluminum, mounted directly to the extrusion frame via countersunk flush screws. Custom aluminum plates carry the non-marring pneumatic casters. I built the cart to be modular, out of necessity. Version 2 (after I purchase a new vehicle in which to transport) will be larger, horizontal-style cart.

P1020671.jpg


P1020672.jpg
 
Here are some updated pics of my cart.

You can see my Mac Pro 4,1 is fully hack sawed and rack mounted. Works great, but it would would be better if it came from Apple ready to rack mount.

Under the Mac Pro is my Cyclone 600-2707 x16 v2 PCIe expander. Works great. I swapped out the case that it came with for the one in the pic. Then I added ten drive trays (2tb each) and an LTO-4. In the expander I have my Red Rocket and raid card. If I use this system for Resolve I will add a GT120 and Blackmagic card to the expander. I am waiting on delivery of the new Atto R60F 16 channel card that will go in the expander.

On the other side of the cart I have my UPS at the top and 2u drawer at the bottom. In between I have two sliding shelves. The top shelf has a Matrox MXO2 LE in back and a Sonnet Qio in front. The bottom shelf is for daily harddrives.

I have two 1920x1080 monitors. The 17" Flanders is awesome. On the right of the Flanders I left space to add an 18" monitor to connect to a 1u rasterizer waveform/vectorscope. One the left of the Flanders is my Cradlepoint wifi router with Sprint 4G card.

So far everything is working great.



Dusty
Local 600 DIT
 

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Dustin Cross said:
The top shelf has a Matrox MXO2 LE in back and a Sonnet Qio in front. The bottom shelf is for daily harddrives.
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So you've got those taking up the two X4 slots in the MacPro I'm guessing, with the other 16x slot for your system graphics card, and the dailies drives via USB, firewire connection for ingest from Red Drives or card readers?

I have two 1920x1080 monitors.
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Are those Asus monitors?

Under the Mac Pro is my Cyclone 600-2707 x16 v2 PCIe expander. Works great. I swapped out the case that it came with for the one in the pic. Then I added ten drive trays (2tb each) and an LTO-4. In the expander I have my Red Rocket and raid card. If I use this system for Resolve I will add a GT120 and Blackmagic card to the expander.
Click to expand...

So wait, you've got one 16x controller in the MacPro connecting to the expander, and then an 8x RAID card(guessing) and the 8x Rocket card? Is the LTO a 4x connection? Isn't this more than the MacPro can support already? Even before you later add a BMD and GT120 card?
 
Chris,

In the Mac Pro I have GTX285 video card, 16x v2 PCIe expander card, Matrox MXO2 LE card, Sonnet Qio card.

In the expander I have Red Rocket (8x v1), Rocketraid (4x v1), Atto R60f (8x v2). If I add a GT120 (8x v1) and Decklink card (4x v1) to the expander it will have to do a little switching if everything is running at full bandwidth, but every card in the expander won't be running at full bandwidth all the time.

I filled up the expander with my Rocket, GTX285, Raid, everything in the expander and it was only slightly slower than having the cards in the Mac Pro with everything running the max I could make it. I had the Rocket working, AE rendering, Motion playing out the MXO2, Color rendering, FCP playing out the Decklink, all working off the Raid. I think what really effected that test was I need more RAM more than the expander.

Yes, the two monitors are cheap little Asus monitors. They work pretty good.


Dusty
 
Dusty,

Great looking cart! I too am a fan of the Flander's. Good to hear the cyclone expander is working well for you. I have an iStoragePro mobile rocket raid but having some issues with it right now. Working on resolving. Couple questions, how do you transport your cart? Also, the cyberpower ups, how long can your run off that and which model? Why choose over an APC, Tripplite, etc...? Is all the rack mounting hardware from racksolutions.com, including the circular (shock absorption isolators?).

Thanks for sharing.
 
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