Pseudonymous 14-year-old tinkerer “The Younger Maker,” hereafter merely “Younger,” has put collectively a miniaturized homage to the favored Synology household of community connected storage (NAS) containers — however as an alternative of three.5″ laborious drives, it makes use of microSD playing cards related to an Espressif ESP32.
“TinyNAS takes inspiration from Tobychui’s unique USB type issue WebStick designed for the ESP8266,” Younger explains. “I’ve tailored and enhanced the idea, remodeling 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 internet server that connects to your property WiFi. It allows native entry via mDNS in your community and might 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 machine, 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 containers — full with three hot-swap drive bays. The sleds for these bays aren’t fairly sufficiently big to suit a 3.5″ laborious drive, although: they’re designed for a customized provider 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 offer entry to information saved on the microSD playing cards — together with the power to add and obtain information, show photographs, stream music and movies, and even act as a server for static websites, all accessible from an internet interface.
The TinyNAS serves information 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, resembling photos or CSS information, 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.
