⚡ Xerxes Pi 2026: blade-style CM5 carriers with NVMe, PoE and even OCuLink

After a successful 2025 campaign, Rapid Analysis is reviving the Xerxes concept with a "Xerxes Home Lab" ecosystem of two carrier boards: the Xerxes Pi 2026 for Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4/5 (and compatible modules) and the Xerxes Nano for NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano Super and Turing RK1 modules, CNX Software reports.

The Xerxes Pi 2026 takes the home-lab logic to its end point: a 120 × 40 mm blade that slots vertically into a 1U rack, M.2 NVMe storage on the underside, Gigabit Ethernet with optional PoE+, a Qwiic connector for I2C and I2S, debug pins and a boot jumper for headless deployment, plus mezzanine connectors breaking out CSI and HDMI. The pitch is mass deployment of silent small machines powered over the network cable.

The Xerxes Nano plays in another league: its OCuLink connector allows an external GPU or any PCIe device to be attached to a Jetson Orin Nano Super (up to 16 GB) or Turing RK1 (up to 32 GB), while keeping an M.2 PCIe Gen 3 slot and a 1U-rack-compatible format. It is one of the first consumer-facing ecosystems to pair affordable SBC modules with external PCIe interconnect — a connector long reserved for workstations.

Both boards are crowdfunded and explicitly target home labs, edge AI developers and small businesses. The message: the compute module is becoming the unit of the maker rack, as it already was for industrial products. Source: CNX Software.