Building a Parallel Pi (physical assembly)

After laying out all of the Pi boards, I came to the conclusion that this will all comfortably fit on a single 12X18 cutting board.  I chose a nylon cutting board because of (1) weight - having 8 cables and 8 power cords attached to all of the Pi boards won't cause everything to want to fly away, (2) it won't conduct electricity and interfere with the operating of the boards, and (3) a cutting board is relatively cheap.

The next question is how to attach the boards.  Ideally, they could be clamped into place using a mechanism so that we don't have to worry about them falling out, regardless of the orientation of the cutting board.  The solution I thought of is to use plastic coax cable staples:

These can be placed under the boards to give some air space between the Pi board and the cutting board, and on top of the board to clamp things in place.  The idea here is to remove the little nails from the staples, drill some holes to run a screw through them, and attach to the cutting board.

There are a couple of points to keep in mind.  First, a nylon cutting board is remarkably hard.  Pilot holes are needed to get a screw to tap into it.  Second, the arrangement of the Pi boards on the cutting board is important.  I decided to keep the CAT5 cables in the middle, with the SD cards and the power lines running around the outside.  This gives good access to the ports and slots in the event that I need to change or update them.  It's important that the master Pi board (board 1 below) has all ports reachable.  This is the machine that the monitor will attach to, so the HDMI port also needs to be accessible.

Here is the completed assembly:

Assembled board, sans cabling

This is a big step for the hardware configuration.  There is still work to do to cable everything up.  After that, we'll be ready to build and configure the parallel code to form a bramble.