Pseudonymous 14-year-old tinkerer “The Younger Maker,” hereafter merely “Younger,” has put collectively a miniaturized homage to the favored Synology household of community hooked up storage (NAS) bins — however as a substitute of three.5″ exhausting drives, it makes use of microSD playing cards related to an Espressif ESP32.
“TinyNAS takes inspiration from Tobychui’s authentic USB kind issue WebStick designed for the ESP8266,” Younger explains. “I’ve tailored and enhanced the idea, reworking it right into a TinyNAS particularly constructed for the ESP32, providing improved efficiency and assist for as much as three SD playing cards. Resembling a miniature NAS, TinyNAS serves as an online server that connects to your property WiFi. It permits native entry by way of mDNS in your community and could be accessed remotely by configuring port-forwarding settings on your property router.”
This miniature mannequin of a three-bay Synology NAS is a fully-functional community system, connecting through Wi-Fi. (📷: The Younger Maker)
The looks of the TinyNAS, in its 3D-printed housing, is designed to imitate that of Synology’s two- and four-bay NAS bins — full with three hot-swap drive bays. The sleds for these bays aren’t fairly sufficiently big to suit a 3.5″ exhausting drive, although: they’re designed for a customized service board which breaks out the pins of a microSD card.
The Wi-Fi radio on the Espressif ESP32 which powers the TinyNAS is used to supply entry to recordsdata saved on the microSD playing cards — together with the power to add and obtain knowledge, show pictures, stream music and movies, and even act as a server for static websites, all accessible from an online interface.
The TinyNAS serves recordsdata saved on as much as three microSD playing cards, loaded into sleds like an actual Synology. (📷: The Younger Maker)
“Whereas the ESP32 theoretically helps community speeds as much as 8Mbps, real-world efficiency usually hovers round 1Mbps for concurrent learn and write operations,” Younger admits.
“This could possibly be influenced by SD card capabilities. Consequently, I like to recommend avoiding massive assets, comparable to footage or CSS recordsdata, on the TinyNAS. Go for utilizing CDNs [Content Delivery Networks] for scripts or using compressed picture codecs like JPEG to reinforce effectivity.”
Full directions on constructing your individual TinyNAS can be found on Younger’s Instructables web page.