LibraryBox
Project Description
LibraryBox is an international project that provides open source, portable digital file distribution tool based on inexpensive hardware that enables delivery of educational, healthcare, and other vital information to individuals off the grid. Used around the world in education, healthcare, and activism, the LibraryBox project attempts to provide an easy-to-implement tool for anyone that needs to distribute digital information where the infrastructure for such sharing is limited, damaged, controlled, or non-existent.
Ideal candidate:
The LibraryBox Project is interested in a variety of possible contributors, from web-front-end, usability, and design work that improve the user experience to Linux devs with networking and LAMP-stack-like experience. Possible interest in Android/iOS app development for Beacon responsiveness.
Project ideas
LibraryBox on Raspberry Pi 3
The existing hardware that LibraryBox uses is under threat from new FCC regulations (http://yro.slashdot.org/story/16/02/18/1423216/tp-link-begins-lockdown-of-firmware-in-response-to-fcc). We have been planning to port our code to a more robust platform, and it appears that now is the ideal time to do so. We will be looking for coders willing to work with the existing PirateBox Raspberry Pi installation (https://piratebox.cc/raspberry_pi) and work to modify it to work with the LibraryBox customizations (some of which is already in progress https://github.com/LibraryBox-Dev/LibraryBox-core/tree/master/piratebox_origin/BuildScripts/RaspberryPi). In addition, the newest Raspberry Pi hardware includes Bluetooth Low-Energy, which we would like to begin using this new capability as a Beacon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBeacon) to do more active “announcing” of a LibraryBox.
Mobile application for BTLE beacon
A side project for this project may be the development of a very simple iOS/Android app that acts as a simple alert mechanism for the BTLE beacon.
The outcome of this would be an SD card image or push-button installer that builds the image for users that enables all existing LIbraryBox functionality, as well as any enhancements (such as BTLE beacons) that we can within the development cycle.
Mesh Networking on LibraryBox
LibraryBox has existing support for client/server synchronization, but enabling more robust network-traversal mesh would be a huge benefit to remote installations. The goal for this project