RP2050 would work, as it also has the necessary built-in peripherals. ESP32 would add wifi and better ESPHome support. I suggest you stay away from the ESP8266, as it needs to do PWM in software and struggles with the 25kHz output frequency.
From my experience: ESP32/RP2040 work without additional circuitry which works with most fans, but for protection, you want to add level shifters. Not all fans pull up the PWM pin to 3.3V, the spec allows for 5V.
Shameless plug, hopefully this is allowed here.
I built something like that, that allows fan control via WiFi. First I built it only for myself, but since the spare boards from PCBA quickly sold, I decided to keep it stocked.
Short gist: 12V Input, ESP32S2, ESPHome-based. Has 4 PWM-fan outputs, onboard temperature & humidity sensor and Qwiic expansion port.
If you want to build it by yourself, the schematic is in the hardware folder. And if you don't want to use ESPHome - there is no firmware lock, you find the pin assignment on the product page and can write your own firmware if you so desire.
As far as I can find, Plex does not support AMD iGPU for transcoding. Jellyfin will work, but support seems rather spotty. For other AI/ML work, it seems like ROCm is up and coming, but support - e.g. for Frigate object detection - is still a work in progress, especially for newer chips.
The appeal for me was the "it just works" factor. It's a compact unit and setup was easy. Every self-built solution would either be rather large (factor for me) and more difficult to set up. And I think, that's what has kept Synology alive for so long. It allows entry level users to get into the selfhosting game with the bare minimum you need, especially if transcoding (Plex/Jellyfin) is mentioned.
As an anecdote, I've had exactly this problem when buying my last NAS some time ago. It was DS920+, DS923+ vs. QNAP TS-464. The arguments for QNAP were exactly what you write. Newer chip, 2.5G NICs, PCIe Slot, no NVMe vendor lock-in. So I bought the QNAP unit. And returned it 5 days later, because the UI was that much hot garbage and I did not want to continue using it.
Lately, the UGreen NAS series looks very promising. I'm hearing only good things about their own system AND (except for the smallest 2-bay solution) you can install TrueNAS. It mostly sounds too good to be true. Compact, (rather) powerful and flexible with support for the own OS.
As the next player, with mixed feelings about support, the Minisforum N5 Units also look promising / near perfect. 3x M.2 for Boot+OS, 5 HDD slots and a PCIe low-profile expansion slot.
I would say cases like the Fractal Node 304 or something like the HL4 / HL8 from 45homelab would be the best suited candidates.
Regarding mainboards - models from CWWK with lots of SATA ports have been trendy lately. But there are reports of problems. The other options are either using some obscure supermicro mainboards with lots of ports or using a HBA for expansion.
I want to mention a possible middle ground here: UGreen NAS Storage. All but the smallest model come the OS on a seperate M.2 drive. If you disable the watchdog in BIOS, you can use the models like a normal Server This would give you:
The M.2 slots are connected rather slow, but good enough for OS/app drives.
For example, my plan for the next NAS would be the 4-Slot N100 variant with TrueNAS. One M.2 SSD for boot, Two M.2 SSDs for Apps/Server duties in mirroring and the 4 drives in Raid-Z1.
It seems to be coming in multiple waves from multiple sides.
One of those is EUs ISA: First a display, now a warning and later actual interference with the driver.
And with the experiences with the current status are enough for me to be against those systems. The car doing an emergency stop because it saw a 30 sign an an adjacent road makes me not wanna purchase such a car. But there will be some time where no alternatives exist.
That "subscription" is one which I gladly pay due to multiple reasons:
1. It supports the developers(s)
2. The price can be directly attributed to cost for training
3. You can keep the models you trained during your subscription indefinately
That's pretty much the opposite to AgentDVR. I don't need hosted services for remote access or push notifications - I can do that myself. But if I want to abide the license terms, I need to purchase a monthly subscription for remote access over my own VPN.
The documentation is rather scarse on performance numbers, but it looks like the hierachy of price/performance is like Intel iGPU ("free"), Intel A310, Nvidia GPU.
I'm explicitly leaving out the Coral TPU, since it's been reported that the newer Intel CPUs (Core Ultra) seem to provide the same performance with it's iGPU.
They have a two-stage approach, first motion detection with - I think - OpenCV and then afterwards object detection of zones of interest with different object detection models, depending on your hardware.
It supports Coral TPU, Halio Accelerator and most GPUs. I think AMD is still the worst, since ROCm is not available on iGPUs.
Afterwards, they provide/support models like edgedet (Coral), YOLO-NAS, YOLO, D-Fine or RF-DETR.
They also offer paid access to a specially trained version of YOLO-NAS where you can also train your own images.
It's frustrating trying to work with ISPs. While there surely are business services available, as a normal customer, you're out of luck.
I count myself lucky, since I can at least get a public (dynamic) IPv4 address. The other option is DSLite with a single /64 via DHCP6. Well, I can't use that. So yeah, while it would be a fun journey trying out IPv6 - it's not feasable for me. And most likely, that holds true for others aswell.
There are options available - like the HE tunnelbroker - but those come with their own set of drawbacks.
A few years ago, I built a simpler version of that device myself.
As you said: A 90% solution is easy to hack together. I had mine displaying Skype for Business status so my colleagues would know if I was in a call or just listening to music.
The harder part or much rather the time consuming part is getting a good status message from the installed apps. It looks like there is plenty of software and APIs available.
They made the analysis, how long the flash will live and saw, that it will make it out of the warranty period. Thus they did not opt for more durable and expensive flash and/or software change.
I've seen this myself before. One process step before release of the control module was a write cycle analysis to make sure the unit will live for at least 10 years (i think) before the guaranteed write cycles of the flash memory were consumed.
My bigger question would be why do you need to verify boot firmware?
If we know your goal, maybe there is a better way.
Tbh, I for myself would not care for physical intrusion. If someone (private or state sponsored) has the willingness to intrude into my home, them tampering with my PC is the least of my concerns. As someone else also mentioned: A $5 wrench will be more effective than any measures you can do by modifying your pc.
Regarding tamper evidence, there have been multiple Defcon / Blackhat talks about tamper evidence. One thing that comes into mind is vacuum sealing a notebook into a bag with colored beans and taking a photo. This way, it will be impossible to access the pc without disturbing the pattern of beans surrounding the PC. You just need the software to compare photos to know if the sealed bag has been tampered with.
You should be able to have two peers. The only thing I see is, that you may need to explicitly define the routing.
The first peer is easy, with allowed IPs of 10.10.0.0/8. The 2nd peer will need more configs, as it should route everything else.
See this answer for an example where all ranges that are not RFC1918 are listed: https://serverfault.com/a/304791
I expect, that you need to enter those ranges as AllowedIPs for the peer that should route to the public internet.
Yeah. If you look at the complete board shots, those chips are inside the sandwich of PCBs. So yeah, it was probably disassembled in an reflow oven without much care for the components.
That's why I'm doing this with an ESP32 instead of an RPi.
The ESP32 has the builtin capability to deep sleep and only draw a few uA of current. In addition, WaveShare offers existing micropython libraries, so it's easy to just flash an ESP32 board with micropython, get your data from an API, format it and go to sleep after displaying it. There are lots of boards with onboard LiIon management, this this setup is very easy to do.
Those HiFi people are still there. And the products evolved with time.
My guess: >90% of music consumers don't care about quality as long as it's good enough. What they care is ease of use. Why should they have a complicated setup and try getting their records in lossless FLAC when they can just go onto Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube and press play.
I've seen lot's of people that don't even care that their audio has the intro parts when playing from youtube. So why should they care for HiFi.
> Minor design revisions would be needed, new software, and lots of drivetrain stuff would need to be retested.
All of those changes would push a series release very far into the future. A "minor design revision" incurs a mountain of verification / validation / testing etc. It will be much cheaper and faster waiting for the components.
From my experience: ESP32/RP2040 work without additional circuitry which works with most fans, but for protection, you want to add level shifters. Not all fans pull up the PWM pin to 3.3V, the spec allows for 5V.
Shameless plug, hopefully this is allowed here.
I built something like that, that allows fan control via WiFi. First I built it only for myself, but since the spare boards from PCBA quickly sold, I decided to keep it stocked.
Short gist: 12V Input, ESP32S2, ESPHome-based. Has 4 PWM-fan outputs, onboard temperature & humidity sensor and Qwiic expansion port.
The ESPHome code & schematic is on Github: https://github.com/zeroflow/wifi-fancontroller
If you want one, it's available on Elecrow for $35,99: https://www.elecrow.com/wifi-fancontroller1.html
If you want to build it by yourself, the schematic is in the hardware folder. And if you don't want to use ESPHome - there is no firmware lock, you find the pin assignment on the product page and can write your own firmware if you so desire.