When you imagine home servers or people's Network Attached Storages, what comes to mind? probably something like this: 

But what If a NAS could so polished and professional that you couldn't even tell that it's a server? Well that's what I was hoping to accomplish.  I started by researching possibilities and found that going for a "smarthome control panel" approach would result in the best, and cleanest result. This whole system will be built around the Zimaboard 2, a SBC (single board computer) running ZimaOS (a light skin on CasaOS).

This server is made as a sandwich between 3 main components: the bezel, the body, and the back. The bezel is rather deep, making a pocket for the monitor to slide in. Funnily enough, this monitor is not in the middle of the bezel. The pocket is offset to compensate the the wonky bezels of the monitor itself.  The next component of the server sandwich is the main body. This body sits right in the middle, and houses all of the electronics. The Zimaboard pcb is mounted on a plastic frame, which attaches to the body with M3 screws. This body also has two 12mm cutouts on the right side. These are to fit some latching buttons. One of these is the main power button, which intercepts the 12v input, and the other powers the led. These both buttons both have built-in LEDs; white for the power button and green for the display button. Now, the body also acts like a giant minimalistic heatsink. Taking inspiration from macbooks, the primary way of dissipating power from the electronics is to simply dump it into the body, to let it radiate passively. This is what makes this server so quiet. There is still a small fan inside, but it cannot be heard at all, especially as the noise is dampened even more when this thing is mounted to a wall.  

The heatsink which thermally couples the zimaboard to the body is made of copper to maximize heat transfer. Even when at maximum load, the CPU never reached a temperature over 40 degrees, which results in great performance and extends the CPU's lifespan.  Finally, there's the back. This is just a large CNCed plate of aluminum, powder coated black. It does have some ventilation holes, but these are intended to be almost fully blocked after installation. These only provide a bonus cooling benefit when the server is not wall-mounted. This back has several screw holes for long, 40mm m3 machine screws to pass through the body and thread into the bezel, clamping this whole assembly together. In areas where the screws cannot reach the bezel due to the 10.1 inch display, the threads are tapped into the body instead. 

For the software side of this, ZimaOS is used as the main operating system, with a fairly sizable application stack. However, the most important app is homeassistant. This is responsible for running the dashboard, showing NAS statics, the time, and weather. I am also hoping to add sensors to this dashboard in the future, for example power meters, motion sensors, co2/co sensors etc. To find out more about this project, check out the printables page and the youtube video below!

https://www.printables.com/model/1629517-elegant-nas-zimaboard2

Exclusive Justway discount ($10 USD off from a $30+ order): Justway@magmabow-10
• Find Justway here: https://justway.com/g/q5G5zP
Exclusive Zimaboard 2 discount ($15 USD off): MagmaBow15
• Purchase link for ZimaBoard 2: https://bit.ly/47fNgxA