As an fanatic and collector of classic tech, I’m all the time amazed by what engineers have been in a position to obtain with primitive digital know-how—and even mechanical or electromechanical techniques. So, when our fashionable computer systems, with their highly effective multicore CPUs and huge quantities of RAM, wrestle and lag, I’m typically left questioning how we handle to take action little with a lot. The true cause for that’s sophisticated and at the moment’s software program is way extra resource-intensive than that of many years in the past. However Zombieschannel didn’t let these excuses maintain him again when he used a microcontroller to host a file server.
In the event you had requested me how you need to construct one thing like a file server or NAS (Community-Connected Storage) machine, I’d have advised you to make use of a single-board pc, similar to a Raspberry Pi or ZimaBlade. That’s what I did for my very own NAS. However, as Zombieschannel proved, these aren’t really obligatory. A microcontroller can do the job — it would simply not do the job fairly as nicely.
A file server like this one solely wants a few issues: storage, community connectivity, and sufficient processing energy and RAM to deal with file transfers. An ESP32 microcontroller has the latter two all by itself. Zombieschannel received that within the type of an Arduino Nano ESP32 improvement board, then added an SD card reader module to offer storage. And whereas it isn’t a necessity, he additionally gave his machine an OLED display screen to show standing info.
That {hardware} is sort of easy, however programming the file server performance wasn’t. Working with recordsdata utilizing a microcontroller is all the time a little bit of a wrestle, because the minimal RAM doesn’t permit for a similar type of file dealing with that a pc can do. However with the assistance of ChatGPT, Zombieschannel was in a position to create an Arduino sketch that permits fundamental file storage and transfers.
This doesn’t have the options typical of a NAS, like automated backups. And it struggles with massive recordsdata — significantly as a result of switch speeds are gradual. But it surely does the fundamentals. The machine connects to a Wi-Fi community and hosts an online interface accessible by native customers. These customers can add or obtain recordsdata via that interface. They’ll additionally use a easy command line interface to work with the file server over a USB serial connection.
Zombieschannel’s file server has a few benefits over one with a single-board pc. Most clearly, it’s extra inexpensive. But it surely additionally consumes a lot much less energy, which is an efficient factor for a tool meant to run indefinitely.