ZimaBoard. The FUN little home lab server that runs dozens of apps, including Proxmox.

in this video I'm going to go over the zema board the 832 model which is an 8 gig version uh 32 gig onboard storage this is a device that was sent to me by Ice whell they asked me to take a look at it which I'm going to do it's not a full comprehensive review it is however a high Lev look at what it what the board is what it does and I'm going to install a few things on it and show you how that works out so let's get [Music] started all right so this is the zemma board in a box this is what I was sent by the company and it uh has a nice little dear friend in it telling us all about their vision and hoping we're having a great time with it there's a little uh Discord QR code on the back and some stickers so if you want to uh stick this on your sticker board or your laptop or whatever else this is what you have in the way of stickers and and here's the board itself calls itself the world's first hackable single board server this is a zma board 832 32 gig of RAM uh or no 32 gig of uh storage 8 gig of RAM and all that jazz single board server all that nonsense and it also comes with a um looks like a 12vt 3 amp power adapter that you'll need to run this and the obligatory multicountry adapter so there's some us stuff in some other countries in case you need to run this elsewhere I'm going to keep the US version myself and just snaps in here like so and like I said it's a 12vt 3 amp can we even see that yep 12vt 3 amp 36 watt output UL listed so that's nice to know and let's open up this little plastic box here maybe it's going to rip and tear like a Christmas present and see what's in the box here what does this thing do everyone wants to get creative about their boxes so just pop this open like a little well just ripped it oh I ripped it again all right a nice little creative box and then inside the box is another box with the actual board in it with a users's manual which means plug it in turn it on there's some ports and things on here if you want to see that and here is a the Box itself or the board itself and then there's also a SATA single Sata cable with power connector on it so we'll need this to hook an external drive to this board that's it and inside here is our our actual zma board and this comes with two gigb Network ports two USB 3 ports a mini is a mini or micro HDMI and then of course that's where the power supply goes for it it has a PCI slot on the side and as everyone said you have this uh design feature which they've taken out the little support on the side there which means that any uh type of card that extends P here can be plugged in to this without having an issue it won't use the the full card uh it only use portion of the card but but it will allow you to plug in the longer cards and then on the front of course we have the two SATA ports and then the power supply for the SATA port and we have um this here which is the heat sink there are no fans or anything inside this device it's all based on passive cooling through that heat sink and what else do we have and that's it that's the board in itself it has a nice acrylic backing on here um um so let's get in some specs about what this is or what it does again this is the 832 model so it does um it has 32 gig of on board storage 8 gig of RAM and we'll get into the other details you can get these in different flavors but it's a nice Hefty board it's a little bit bigger than a standard Raspberry Pi board a Raspberry Pi for board um much bigger than a zero or a w but anyway we're not comp comparing to those it's a nice board so let's see what we can do with it before I get to turning it on and seeing what's installed in it let's talk about the different versions real quick uh I have the 832 this was sent to me by uh ice whale and it is the n 3450 processor four cores 1.1 GHz base 2.2 GHz Pur and 2 megabytes of L2 cache uh it has uh all these are the same well this one's at 650 MHz burst for the graphics card it has 8 gig of memory 32 gig of onboard storage in fact they all come with a 32 gig of onboard storage uh and these are all based on the Intel Celeron Apollo Lake processor you can't add additional memory to this as far as I know so what you get is what you get you buy what you buy and then the onboard storage is the same way you can't really swap it out so if you're going to do anything with storage you're going to need to make sure you add an external drive to this all right now let's get it fired up and see what's installed on it if anything all right I've powered it up and right now it's uh got a nice little indicator light here on the side telling me it's got power I suppose and I've got uh network activity or the network activity light anyway so it means it's doing something so if you pay attention to the manual that I threw on the floor when you first get it set up you can uh assuming your network set up the right way you can go to Cass .l so let's just try that out and see if that's what actually happens so cast. .lo not sure what the bootup time is on this it may take more time then I've given it and of course your network has to be set up to actually take advantage of that kind of naming convention I spelled it wrong it's Casa OS so go to ca s s a. local and see if that brings anything up sure enough there it is all right so this uh board actually has Casa OS installed on it this is a actually an OS written by written or provided by Ice well to be able to do a lot of the functions right out of the box on this particular device so I'm going to have to set up a username and a password and for that we'll be right back okay there's my username and password we're good to go that's nice show news feeds uh no I don't think why not uh no let's not do that right now okay so right off the bat you get to a dashboard and this is not going to be an in-depth view of this Cass cassa Casa OS um but it does actually have it installed on um on here so what we have is uh the system CPU status and temperature how much RAM is available and use our storage and network status and all of that there is what they call an app store and this is where I think they they want to um really make it easy for everyone to use this device because you have a lot of common things like um home assistant you could actually install home assistant on here directly that's interesting jelly is available aduard home py hole Plex uh grafana you can do that you can also do custom installs too if you're into uh the docker uh world you can actually go get uh the docker um or you can go install stuff within Docker directly uh then you can do your environment variables I think you can even go in here and create uh yeah you can actually import your Docker compos file uh and run it directly that way and do all of your stuff so if you're running Docker on something else and you want to put it over here uh via Docker compose you can do it here so let me just install something and see what it does I'm always curious whether or not Plex will work so let's just do that now what I haven't done is installed any kind of um any kind of extra storage and that's going to be probably an issue in a minute so what I want to probably do is go ahead and find an SSD and put on here I should have done that from the beginning so let me finish the installation and then we will find an SSD to install on this particular device and see what we can do with it all right Plex is installed here so you can actually open it and that's that's pretty darn fast so I can actually log into my Plex account let me try that real quick without giving away my credentials here I'll just click a couple buttons while you're not looking and see what happens well that's very interesting well there's Plex running I wonder if I can actually Place something without getting copyright strikes let me find something here let's see how well this plays none of this crap I want to watch all right here we go let's try this so this is playing from the zema board on my computer here through a browser okay well that's nice uh what about this that delay you're seeing here might be just loading up or buffering the network um from the antenna on the Attic So This is Plex running on here without any kind of issues at all and if we look at this uh is that accurate that's interesting wow this is pretty good this is really nice so ple Plex actually runs really well on here uh no problems at all maybe this will be my Plex server uh to get it off of my PC which is where I'm running it now that that would be great if it would work see how well it plays something of high quality oh that's fast very fast wow okay well there you go that works very well all right so I added a SATA drive to uh to this whole setup here so this is just a uh a Seagate momentus 5400 uh. 6 250 gig drive one I just like I said I found laying it around found it laying around it's the only SATA drive I have available and I'm living large with no case so that's nice all right so there is actually a um there is a where is it at here there's a file manager here and let's see if there is any kind of add a location here new local storage that's not it well single storage device ext4 that's not it because it would be 250 gig not sure what that is you have your MMC drive here 29.2 gigabytes so I'm not sure H maybe this drive is not reporting properly so because I plugged that drive in while the system was up and running shame on me um I'm going to do a reboot of this and see if uh see if it'll pick it up there actually is an update for this as well so there's a restart button how about if I show you there is a restart button and a shutdown button here and there is an update available for it as well this is probably an update for Cass OS Casa OS but I'm going to restart and see if it picks up that drive at all and I can feel that the drive is actually um I can feel it it's running I mean it's spinning so we'll see if it picks it up after a reboot and what is it doing is it rebooting I don't know now I don't know what I'm missing here if this is a cassa casa OS issue or something else but we are not restarting oh look we can go in [Music] here yeah I don't know what it's doing let me just shut it down maybe I can do a shutdown and then uh I can turn it back on am I sure you bet it beta okay well it's shutting down I don't know why it wouldn't restart but it it'll shut down apparently and let's see what happens here I don't know what it's doing but uh I will show you this um the light is off so there's no power light so so it did shut down the drive is no longer spinning the OS screen says that it is still shutting down so I'm going to restart it by pulling the plug and getting it going again okay red lights on so it means it's coming back up in a few minutes we'll have this uh the drive is already spinning which means it probably just has power and I just make sure I have connection here okay so that's all seems fine uh all right we will reboot this I mean we will refresh the screen and see if it's back look at that it just comes right back up when it's back uh my little widget thing is gone down here so that's not running yet oh look it did it found a new Drive 232 gig all right so there we go I should have just plugged it in while it was off instead of doing it while I was running so now we have drive and it is healthy so that one there good so we have two of them uh okay this is the 250 gig drive so let's format and create it and it's going to create whatever okay so now we have a total of 250 gabt of drive there was a uh widget manager thing on here in a widget store I don't know where that is now it was here a second ago this is what people talk about when this not quite polished there was a file a file manager and an app store thing here which I no longer see is that what we do here times system St yeah so now what all right so I don't know um what's going on I guess the only thing you can do at this point is is pull the update and maybe that'll solve it I think what I'm going to do now uh is I'm going to install proxmox on here well it is now the next day and it's only because I ran out of time yesterday but I did get proxmox installed on the EA board and I also installed home assistant and I also installed a Debian 11 uh container as well and so I'm running W Dean I'm running uh home assistant OS and if you look at this right here out of four CPU cores I've got 3% of the CPU used currently uh I've got um 46% of the memory and a lot of that um home assistant I actually specked out 4 gig of memory so it's actually because it's a VM it's running 4 gig all the time even though it's not using 4 gig uh with the Debian I'm actually running this as an lxc container and so it only uses the memory needed uh 2 gig expect out as a Max but it's only currently using about 143 Meg so uh this is the zma board running 2 VMS and on this Debbie and 11 VM I'm actually running adguard as well so it is actually doing active DNS as well as just running the OS uh it's actually my secondary DNS server in my network right now and I was just testing that playing around with it so works very well uh home assistant worked just fine it's actually quite fast um it's as fast as my home assistant blue and stuff now remember I'm not running this at full capacity uh but even my home assistant blue uses about 2 gig of memory total 2 and a half gig of memory running all of the stuff I run on it and that's my production system one thing I did want to point out is that in home assistant uh I am able to pass through the USB zwave controller without any issue at all um so what you do in prox MOX is you basically go in and you you um set up a pass through for that device uh under I think it's Hardware somewhere in here I'm not going to go through that you probably know how that works but uh you can set up pass through and it works just fine for things like the USB sticks for your zwave controllers and stuff like that so uh overall I'm real pleased with this um it's working well and I'm going to continue to use it and probably add a few more containers over here to do some other stuff with it um so no problem at all for a small little playground uh home or playground home lab setup I think it'll be just fine for that you just got to be careful uh you can't add more memory um you can add additional storage to those connectors on the front as we did you can see I'm running uh that uh hard drive on the front of that all right that's it um this was a longer video again um but I just wanted to show you that indeed you can do other things with the zemma board besides just running the casa OS um I didn't try this but I didn't install over top of the casa OS you could potentially go in there and reboot back into Casa OS and run all these things in Docker containers directly on the uh Casa OS VM or the casa OS um operating system that's already pre-installed with the zma board and the reason you can do proxmox on the zma board is because it become it becomes um available or comes out of the box ready to do virtualization it's set up for that so you actually can virtualize things with it all right let me know if you have any questions in the comments down below um again just a quick overview of the zma board and um you know a couple things you can do with it uh lots of other reviews out there as well if you really want to dig into this board uh go check out a few of the other channels that talk about it and uh with that we'll see you on the next video thanks for watching

Channel: mostlychris

Views: 3,959

Keywords: Smart Home, Home Assistant, zimaboard proxmox, zimaboard 832, zimaboard review, zimaboard projects, zimaboard plex, zimaboard home assistant, proxmox install, proxmox home assistant, proxmox docker, casaos proxmox, casaos zimaboard, adguard home, home server, home lab, zima board, zimaboard home server, zimaboard server, home lab setup, home server dashboard, home server build

Id: FsfgAKskIdY

Length: 20min 2sec (1202 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 25 2024