20 Home Server Projects You Can Start TODAY - CasaOS + ZimaBoard

the Zima board has been out for a little while now but I thought it'd be a great time to check in and see how it's doing along with the open source project Casa OS which shifts with every zema board I also wanted to share with you lots of projects that you can start today with your zema board just in case you needed some inspiration for your Tech projects I'll cover some of the easy or beginner projects that don't take a lot of work to get going then we'll cover some projects for the tinkerer and then some projects for the hardcore weekend warrior Tech types parkour I don't know why I'm doing this but the hardcore people that's what hardcore people do but first what is the zema board the Zima board is a self-proclaimed world's first hackable singleboard server which means that it's a complete functioning computer built on a single board circuit and while most don't have expansion slots this one actually does the zema board comes in three varieties the 232 has an Intel Celeron n3550 dual core CPU two gigs of RAM and the 432 has a quad core Intel Celeron n3450 CPU with 4 gigs of RAM and the 832 which has the same quad-core Intel Celeron n3450 but Twice The Ram of the 432 for a total of 8 gigabytes of RAM outside of those differences each Zima board comes with 32 gigs of emmc storage two SATA ports for disk drives two gigabit Lan ports two USB 3.0 ports and what makes this different than most kits you see out there is the pcie slot that you can connect almost any pcie devices to but more on that later it also has a mini display port that can output 4K 60 and has a TDP of only 6 Watts a few other things you might be interested in if you're a geek like me is that the CPU supports Intel VTX for virtualization and vt--d for a hardware passthrough AES and I for encryption and 4K video transcoding all which will come in handy for some of the projects we're going to talk about today so first we're going to start with the beginner projects but don't be fooled by the name this doesn't mean that the projects aren't technical it just means that they take very little to get started and very little to maintain we're going to start with one of the best uses for your Zima board and that's Casa OS Casa OS comes pre-installed with your Zima board it's an Open Source service I'll say and not necessarily an OS it's installed on top of Debian and many other Linux distributions but I still think the name's fitting it's software that focuses on delivering simple personal cloud experiences around the docker ecosystem and I think they've done a great job on delivering on that promise you can launch it from the desktop on your Zima board or you can simply connect to it from a web browser on your network you'll be greeted with the dashboard in a few widgets we can see the time our system status including CPU and RAM usage are storage along with any additional connected drives our Network status where we can toggle between our network adapters and we also get a built-in search bar where we can search using our favorite search engine there are two things you'll be using this dashboard for installing and managing apps and managing the file system including shares if we launch the App Store and take a look we can see lots of applications that we can choose to install the nice thing about Casa OS is that every single app you see here can be installed and configured with just a single click that means no messing around with ports account names volumes or any of the other typical things you do when installing Docker containers also you don't even need to know what a Docker container is you can almost treat this like an app store without knowing any of the implementation details which is kind of nice for a beginner but there are still some things here for the advanced some of the apps included in the App Store pie hole for network-wide ad blocking Plex or jellyfin for a media server home assistant for home automation next Cloud for a Google workspaces like experience and many others that will help you build up your own little personal cloud in no time and if you can't find the application you want in their app store you can also run any Docker container you'd like by using the custom install feature in the app store and then either filling out the form or using the import feature to paste in Docker commands a Docker compose file an app file which is an export you create to share with friends from your own apps importing configs will fill this form out for you it's kind of Hit or Miss if all the settings will be imported properly so it's worth looking in to make sure they are right like here we don't have a proper Minecraft server data directory so we can click in here create one and then map it pretty cool once the apps are installed if they have a web management page we can simply click on the app to launch it and then configure it from there the other place where you're likely to spend a lot of time is in the files app the files app is a super elegant way to manage files and share them and I think it's one of the cleanest file management uis out there not only because it looks good and it's fast but also because it makes sharing files super easy let's take a look after launching the files app we can see a default storage location for our media in documents and from here we can upload download and manage files if we like and it even has a built-in file previewer for different file types if you want to share the file from here you can simply share the folder from the menu then open it from any machine on your local network that has to be one of the simplest ways of sharing files I've ever seen if you want to see all of your shares you can simply click on the share icon at the bottom and it will list all the shared folders you have since we're talking about sharing and we're down here in the bottom left we should talk about the files drop feature this is a super cool feature similar to airdrop for Apple devices except it works on the web and with any device that has a file browser let's say for instance we're on a Windows machine and we want to share a file with our phone instead of transferring files through Google Drive and then uploading them and then downloading them on our phone we can simply do it through Casa OS on our local network if we click on the files drop button it will launch a new experience where it will show my machine it's the one right there the windows Chrome machine and then any other device that connects to Casa OS and visits this page will also show up here when I connect my phone you should see another icon pop up it says Mac OS Chrome but it should say iOS Chrome but that's not important from my Windows machine I can click on my phone icon and then choose files I want to send to it if I want to send a photo right here I choose it and then on my phone I will get a prompt to save it and then I can save it to my phone I can also go the other way and upload files from my phone back to my machine all without the cloud and from any device that has a web browser pretty awesome one feature that you might be interested in when using the files app is the availability to connect to cloud storage if we click on the plus we can add a Dropbox account a Google Drive account or even another Network share on our local network this feature is really cool for connecting and transferring files from your Google drive to your own cloud or vice versa this is also helpful for migrating to or from the cloud and can be even more useful if one day you can backup your data from Casa OS to one of these locations another thing you might be interested in is the storage feature this feature is limited but allows you to add additional drives to your Zima board in a snap you just open the storage manager and click create storage you get a prompt asking you if you want to add a device and that it will erase all of its contents from the device once it's created you should see the device in the files app and you can use it for additional storage there's also this new merge storage option that will merge all of your storage into one which seems like a simple way of expanding your storage but this also means if one drive dies you might lose all of your data I did enable it and it does exactly what it says it merges multiple drives into one big volume using merge FS it's also pretty easy to undo too now don't let the Simplicity of this UI fool you you can still do some Advanced things from the web dashboard like access logs access the terminal and access the logs from each individual Docker container and the ability to exec into them all in all I think Casa OS is probably the best project for Zima board the next project I can see people using azima board for is for installing and running operating systems windows and Linux run fine on azima board and I've tested it with Windows 10 Ubuntu desktop Ubuntu server and I'm sure many other distributions will run on this board because at the end of the day it's an x86 Intel based system you shouldn't have any issues getting or installing drivers because it's running on Intel Hardware most things will be be plug and play and if you're going to go this route I would recommend picking up a USB hub and a solid state drive for additional storage then you can run or test your software in this tiny little package it does output to 4K 60hz so it'll look great on any display though it will start to push the limits on what's possible with what you can do with this little Board office apps web browsing watching videos are all fine anything outside of that and you might need a little bit more power you can even dual boot Windows and Linux with two drives either by connecting two drives or by swapping them each time you want to boot but that's starting to get into some more advanced use cases and maybe more for the tinkerer okay Tinkers these are the folks who aren't afraid of running Linux headless know their way around a terminal and know how to exit them well first you make sure you're in edit mode and that you aren't in command mode and then press colon plus quit but if you've made changes foreign get the picture the first thing I would recommend running on a zema board for this group is portaner ortaner is a great UI to run all of your containerized applications some of the same applications we just talked about earlier like Plex jellyfen next cloud and many others this gives you a lot more control over which OS you run and which applications you run and can keep it as minimal as you want saving on resources but with all of that comes a little complexity but you're a tinkerer right you don't mind complexity another quick project that sounds like a ton of fun is emulation station which is the same software that retropie is based on just install your OS windows or Linux and then install emulation station and your emulators and connect a few controllers and you're good to go the Zima board has all the rest of the hardware you need to play retro games and is compact enough to bring with you on your road trip other uses for azima board include some projects that I will definitely be using this for and these are Diagnostic and troubleshooting projects first it's a disk wiping station having a dedicated little machine to securely wipe discs that I'm no longer using is welcome because my current solution is using this old Yankee PC having something this small and dedicated to wiping discs just makes sense after you use it I can just boot to kill disk start to wipe and walk away another thing that I use this old janky PC for is updating firmware on devices especially ssds this is usually the case when building new systems or replacing drives in existing systems I can even do the same for nvme drives with this little pcie adapter another thing I do with this janky old PC sorry old PC it's not and it is janky but maybe not that Jinky is cloning discs I use Clonezilla every now and then to backup or clone hard drives from one to another phonezilla has been my go-to for years either backing up and restoring images over the network or doing a disc to disk clone if you're doing a disc to disc clone you'll need to pick up one of these special y adapters that let you connect two devices at once but it's like four bucks in their store another use case is data recovery it's nice to have a small and simple machine that I can plug a drive into and try to recover files if the drive is no longer bootable all of this is easy and accessible with the Zima board now you may have noticed that I didn't mention an S that's because I honestly think that the best snatch you can run on this tiny little machine is Casa OS sure true Nas and open media Vault should work fine but Casa OS already does this all beautifully all while running containers too and since you're a tinkerer you might as well install Debian headless then install Casa OS to save on resources the last group of projects is geared towards the hardcore it's for those folks who like to push Hardware to the limits or experiment with something they've never tried before this is where I think the pcie slot really comes into play this pcie slot can be used to connect any pcie device as long as it can run in an X4 slot which should be most because the slot is is open at the end while I know it's technically possible to attach a video card to this device I'm not sure that the majority of the people who pick up this device will be doing so I mean I could be wrong but I think more people will be attaching smaller devices like extra Knicks wireless adapters and possibly more SATA drives this opens the door for turning this device into a router or firewall having four cores two one gigabit Nix AES and I and up to eight gigs of RAM make this a solid choice for PF sense or open sense and if you want to turn this into an access point all you need to do is add a wireless Nick and you have a nice little open wrt system but even if you're not into creating a router or a firewall and you're the hardcore type there are plenty of projects for you if you know raid owl he created a high availability cluster with three of these using proxmox which is another use case and that's installing a hypervisor because the Zima board supports VTX and vtd it can be used to test out the latest hypervisor and if creating and testing virtualization is doing your thing there's the use case that I think that this is great for and it's developing and testing Hardware most developers I know have laptops and don't have access to a pcie slot and it can be painful if you're working on a project that requires it for example machine learning and AI the coral TPU from Google is a great example of how you can add a small pcie device that is capable of doing AI in a small package and if I could get my hands on one it would fit right here in the slot having AI on a small board like this could let you do local detections from your video feeds so you can detect all sorts of things like people cars and more there are so many use cases for the hardcore then I could really go on all day zema boards are super flexible and can be applied to many projects whether you are a beginner a tinkerer or a hardcore Enthusiast there's bound to be a project for you now I'm sure that I didn't cover all the projects that you can do with the Zima board and if I miss one let me know in the comments below what you do use one for well I learned a ton about Zima boards Lots about cool projects and I hope you learned something too and remember if you found anything in this video helpful don't forget to like And subscribe thanks for watching

Channel: Techno Tim

Views: 128,832

Keywords: zimaboard, simple nas, how to set up a simple home server, casaos tutorial, filesdrop, file sharing, home server, easy nas, home server projects, tech project ideas, zimaboard projects, casa os, docker, files drop, google drive, video card, pcie, router, pfsense, opnsense, emulationstation, dual boot, windows, linux, debian, ubuntu, firmware, sata, ssd, hdd, wipe, clonezilla, intel, x86, pi alternatives, machine learning, ai, plex, jellyfin, home assistant, minecraft server, coral, tpu, google, openwrt

Id: La3NJZtI5OE

Length: 14min 43sec (883 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 14 2023