Wiretrustee Cancels Its Four-Port Raspberry Pi CM4 NAS Plans, Releases All Designs as Open Source

A work-in-progress effort to create a carrier board to turn a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 into a four-bay network attached storage (NAS) system has been discontinued by its creator — with the design files now published under a permissive open source license.

Wiretrustee unveiled its SATA carrier board a year ago, having been inspired by experiments maker Jeff Geerling carrier out with the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4's PCI Express connectivity. "I'm not chasing high IO therefore a limitation of PCIe x1 wasn't a real problem to me," Wiretrustee's Mikhail Bragin wrote at the time. "I still think you could have a decent speed with only one lane especially for my case where I anyway will connect and download/upload files from/to the home network via the internet (mobile mostly)."

The small-footprint board accepted any model of Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 and offers USB, HDMI, and Ethernet connectivity alongside a fan connector, battery-backed real-time clock, microSD slot, and four on-board SATA power and data connectors in a PCB designed to act as a backplane in a NAS housing.

Sadly, while prototypes were created and a Crowd Supply crowdfunding campaign planed, the board fell short of a commercial realization. "There was quite a hype around this board and still we have lots of people waiting for it," Bragin tells Hackster.io of the project.

"Unfortunately we decided to discontinue the project due to semiconductor market situation. And just yesterday I open-sourced the design files under permissive license."

With the crowfunding campaign canceled, Wiretrustee has opened the project to all: The design files for the board, custom heatsink, and chassis have been published to the company's GitHub repository under the CERN Open Hardware License v2 — Permissive. Bragin, meanwhile, has turned his attention to a separate project: A zero-configuration virtual private network system.