Grants • Education • Outreach

Built for STEM programs, makerspaces, and research labs.

BLOCK VECTOR ER-Series is a 12U furniture-grade micro data-center rack designed to make “hands-on infrastructure” practical in classrooms, labs, and small research environments—without needing a server room.

The platform combines Raspberry Pi 5 full nodes, miner clusters, multi-WAN networking, and metered power into a documented, reproducible build. It is intentionally designed as a grant-ready prototype that can support education, outreach, and applied research in networking, energy use, and decentralized systems.

ER-Series rack overview Discuss a grant collaboration

Education & curriculum

The ER-Series rack anchors a lab where students can see, touch, and measure the hardware behind “the cloud” and public blockchains. Typical use cases include:

Hands-on labs in networking, VLANs, and multi-WAN failover.
Energy-use and efficiency modules using real power measurements and thermal data.
Demonstrations of Bitcoin full nodes, miners, and peer-to-peer infrastructure.
Project-based learning for makerspaces, STEM clubs, and capstone projects.

The goal is not simulated screenshots—it’s letting students interact with a live, instrumented micro data center under controlled conditions.

Grant-ready infrastructure

The BLOCK VECTOR ER-Series and its documentation suite are being prepared for regional and federal grant programs that focus on:

Resilient home-office and small-business networking.
Energy-aware computing and measurement of power use.
STEM education in computing, networking, and data collection.
Repeatable, open documentation for lab-scale deployments.

Every build is backed by a structured bill of materials, wiring maps, and step-by-step procedures so that multiple sites can be deployed consistently and audited.

Data for decision-makers

Beyond the hardware, the ER-Series rack is designed to produce structured, re-usable datasets that are valuable to faculty, students, and external partners:

Time-series data for power draw, hashrate, and thermals under realistic workloads.
Metrics for WAN failover events, uptime, and latency under different network designs.
Benchmarks comparing low-power miners and node configurations.
Configuration and measurement workflows that can be repeated across cohorts.

These datasets can support classroom exercises, student research projects, and formal reporting requirements for grant-funded pilots.

Facilities & resources

BLOCK VECTOR Technologies, LLC maintains a dedicated testbed used to design and validate the ER-Series platform:

Dedicated multi-WAN test environment based on TP-Link Omada routers.
Raspberry Pi 5 compute clusters with dual-NVMe storage for full nodes and services.
ASIC miner load generators (e.g., BitAxe) and low-power teaching miners.
VLAN-segmented lab network with managed switching for load and traffic variation.
Power monitoring and environmental sensing for energy and thermal characterization.
Documentation and software tooling for reproducible builds and data collection.

This lab is used both as a development environment and as a reference implementation for grant partners evaluating similar deployments.

How we work with grant partners

BLOCK VECTOR can support grant proposals and funded projects in several ways, depending on the scope and stage of the work:

Pilot deployments. Provide ER-Series racks and documentation as the core of a small-scale lab or demonstration environment.
Curriculum support. Align equipment capabilities with course outcomes and lab exercises in networking, energy, and decentralized systems.
Measurement & reporting. Help design data-collection workflows that support grant reporting requirements.
Scale-up planning. Use results from the prototype lab to inform larger roll-outs or follow-on proposals.

If you are planning a proposal or exploring a small pilot focused on resilient networking, micro data centers, or STEM infrastructure, we would be happy to discuss whether the ER-Series rack is a good fit.

Contact BLOCK VECTOR Technologies, LLC about grant and education partnerships »

Grant documentation & downloads

Additional documents—including budget narratives, capabilities sheets, and facilities statements—can be prepared upon request.