Wiretrustee CM4 Stata Board (Discontinued) | Hacker News Reader

Wiretrustee CM4 Stata Board (Discontinued)

github.com

I tested a prototype of their board and was impressed [1], but can understand why they couldn't get to production.

At this point, I'm hopeful the Radxa Taco [2] will be a worthy replacement. It adds on 2.5 Gbps ethernet and two M.2 slots for an additional NVMe SSD and WiFi 6 (or other uses).

[1] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2021/wiretrustee-sata-pi-b...

[2] https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com/boards_cm/radxa-taco.html

Posted this after receiving an email from the Wiretrustee team this afternoon. Unfortunately it seems their RPi CM4 SATA board has been cancelled (supply chain!). Full text of the email appears below.

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After you haven't heard from us since August, we are calling you with some news today. It is with a heavy heart that we have to announce that we have stopped working on the Wiretrustee CM4 SATA board. It was a very exciting time for all of us in the team during which we received a lot of support from all of you. Almost 10,000 followers of our Crowd Supply page show that we were not completely wrong.

But in the end, we don't see any improvements in the current situation of the global electronic components supply chain. So far, there's no telling when we might be able to offer you the board at an acceptable price.

To offer you at least something, we have decided to open-source all the design files that we created so far. You will find them soon on GitHub under the following link: https://github.com/wiretrustee/cm4-sata-board

In the meantime, we have fully dedicated ourselves to another project and further expanded the P2P network developed for the board. We will now continue to pursue this with full force and extend it with further functionalities to a full open-source alternative for traditional VPN.

We would be very happy if you support us in this project and leave us a star on GitHub. https://github.com/wiretrustee/wiretrustee

Frustratingly, they have obviously not open sourced all design files. The only similar file formats present in that repo are: PDF, DXF, and SVG. No source files!

We will post the design files soon. We just need to organize them a bit.

P.S. I'm a Wiretrustee author

Okay great! Just wanted to make sure. I’ve recently used the CERN-OHL-P license for my hardware designs, you might want to consider that.

Thanks for the reply. Sorry about the supply chain problems, very frustrating.

Very exciting! Happenstance yesterday renewed my interest in DIYing a CM4-based laptop motherboard replacement, and having more open designs to learn from will only help that. I'm looking at qty=1 so expensive components aren't such an impediment...

I wish more designs would go open when they're no longer commercially viable. All it's going to do in the long term is breed better hardware designers, after all.

Got their announcement email this morning, and I'm really disappointed. I don't particularly want to buy a full CM4 I/O board and plug in a 4-port SATA card, and have a giant bare board with no case. I want something purpose-designed and integrated, with a bit of polish.

From their email:

> In the meantime, we have fully dedicated ourselves to another project and further expanded the P2P network developed for the board. We will now continue to pursue this with full force and extend it with further functionalities to a full open-source alternative for traditional VPN.

I'm having a little trouble parsing this, but this sounds... not all that interesting to me, unfortunately.

Originally, the project was about hardware with storage capabilities and a software layer that would allow to access your data without configuring a router, leveraging Wireguard peer-to-peer capabilities. That is what the second part is about - the networking software.

Ack! We were excited to see this. While not exactly the same, we're building (& shipping!) an RPi CM4 SATA carrier board as well, in the PiBox (https://pibox.io/). Just finishing up the final details of the metal case and shipping out the first circuit boards this morning!

I hope we'll see a huge increase in is-actually-a-real-computer-running-real-software IoT devices once the supply-chain issues start to get resolved. At any rate, we think there is a very bright future for home-hosting and IoT!

Other PiBox / KubeSail cofounder here. I put in an enormous amout of time into designing around components that can be easily sourced and are stocked regularly. A good example of this is the SL2.1A USB hub we use. The datasheet is in Chinese, but after testing it on several prototypes, we saw great reliability for 1/10th the cost. And its always in stock. Currently Microchip USB hub chips are either out of stock everywhere, or cost $5+, which doesn't make sense for low-cost Pi accessories.

The only issue we still face is sourcing actual Raspberry Pi compute modules. There's very little we have control over there.

There are rk3566 based replacements for the rpi cm4. Radxa CM3 and Pine64 SOQuartz.

I think that Wiretrustee network might be something to support in Kubesail as an app. We could have a look into the integration possibilities.

Give it a shot :)

https://github.com/wiretrustee/wiretrustee

Awesome project, guys! Best of luck with the further development.

P.S. Wiretrustee Author

Thank you! I'm sorry to see this project give up, but I completely understand how painful the supply chain is right now

s/stata/sata in the title

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