Techie makes his own motherboard to refurbish 15-year-old HP ProLiant N40L tower server — Raspberry Pi CM5 adds NVMe and USB 3.0

Nobody likes throwing away old hardware with a lot of usable parts, and most everyone loves a nice DIY electronics project. Those two things dovetailed nicely into YouTuber EastMakes' project to repurpose his ancient HP ProLiant N40L micro-server. The machine's integrated motherboard-and-SoC was far too long in the tooth, so he did the logical thing: designed his own around a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 (CM5).

EastMakes didn't want to trash the N40L, but it had zero NVMe slots, only USB 2.0 ports, and its once-laudable power consumption figures are rather unimpressive today. Needless to say, the computing power on offer was, at lack of a better word, minimal, as even back then the onboard AMD Turion II chip barely outran a pocket calculator. Even a contemporary Raspberry Pi can outperform the original hardware on all fronts, plus use a frugal amount of watts while doing so.

The CM5 is exactly the same as a standard Raspberry Pi 5, except it doesn't have any ports and is meant to be used with external accessories that provide them. Oftentimes, budding enthusiasts will use it with its premade corresponding I/O PCB. EastMakes did start with that board, but taking advantage of the Raspberry Pi project's open-source nature, he took the original diagrams and documentation and rolled his own variation.

The tech wizard extended the board to fit the area the original ProLiant N40L used, and printed a simple plastic 3D prototype to ensure he got the port and screw-hole locations just right. From thereon, he moved onto optimizations like trimming down to just the one HDMI port, and adding a connector stack with the Ethernet port and two USB 3.0 Type-A connectors.

He also wired an NVMe slot to the PCB for a system drive, and spent some time with trace lengths to ensure they all matched, as to not come up against any timing issues. Although EastMakes didn't go as far as adding RGB lighting, he did add a little pizzazz by way of choosing a yellow-on-black finish for his new motherboard, using PCBWay's custom configurator. Boop and Reboop switches were added as well.

After he got the freshly minted PCB, he tested it, and it worked right on the first try. We do have to add that while EastMakes found this to be a positive, any grizzled greybeard knows that when a complicated project or piece of code works fine the first time, it means there's definitely a nasty bug hidden somewhere.

Nevertheless, he put it into the N40L box, and presto, it fit just right and booted just fine, and EastMakes tested USB and Ethernet connection speeds to ensure everything was up to spec. He did stop short of adding the requisite SFF-8087 port for the hard drive bay, so we venture he has plans for that later on.

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