Video LibraryBox is an Open Source Server That Runs on Low-Cost Hardware (Video) 47
A lot of people obviously like this project and wish it well. LibraryBox ran a Kickstarter campaign in 2013, hoping for $3000, and raised $33,119. But today's interviewee, Jason Griffey, can explain his project better than we can, so please watch the video (or read the transcript) if you want to learn more about LibraryBox -- including the story behind the project's name. (Alternate Video Link)
Tim: Jason,can you tell us a little bit about LibraryBox?
Jason: I can. So LibraryBox is an open-source project that provides code that runs on about seven or eight different pieces of hardware, the code provides a box that will give you Wi-Fi signal. The Wi-Fi signal is connectable by cellphone, laptop, tablet, whatever you’ve got. You launch a browser and it will serve the files that are located on the thumb drive. The thumb drive is the hardware storage, so you’re talking about 16, 32, 64 gigabytes worth of content, which is a whole lot of books. And the Wi-Fi signal is good for about 100 to150 feet.
Tim: What’s the need for this?
Jason: So there is still a lot of parts of the U.S. that don’t have reliable internet, right. They don’t have reliable cellphone, they don’t have reliable Wi-Fi and you can serve digital files using this anywhere at all off the grid, use a standard 5 volt USB power. So it runs on a battery, you can run it off of a solar panel, you can run it off a bicycle generator. Very very low power needs. So, outreach is a big thing, getting out into the world and sharing digital files and in the developing world, parts of Africa, India, China, this is a pretty important thing to have in order to be able to share digital files way off the grid.
Tim: So the LibraryBox.
Jason: Yes.
Tim: It is a server.
Jason: It is.
Tim: So why call it LibraryBox?
Jason: I am a librarian by training. I was an academic librarian until very very recently and now I’m kind of acting as library consultant and technologist. And my kind of drive to develop this has really revolved around the open access and freedom of information, so calling it a LibraryBox is kind of a fun twist. It was originally developed as a fork of the PirateBox project, and as the PirateBox project is pretty straightforwardly named, I decided I wanted a name that was also indicative of kind of the uses I saw for it.
Tim: You could put anything you want on that drive.
Jason: Absolutely.
Tim: What are some things that come to mind?
Jason: Sure, so if you buy one from the LibraryBox project or if you build one and just download our content pack, it comes with a set of open public domain works or freely licensed works that have been suggested to me by librarians over the last 18 months or so. So a lot of kind of the western classics from Project Gutenberg, public domain movies from archive.org, freely licensed works from authors like Cory Doctorow, that sort of thing.
Tim: Talk a little bit about the hardware and the software, the hardware is what?
Jason: Sure, the hardware that we run on is a variety of commercial hardware, mostly TP-Link routers, they are easily hackable and really quite wonderful little things to work with. So the one I am holding is an MR3020, there is also the MR3040, which has a battery built in. The WR703N, which is a slightly smaller version of this. Those are kind of our primary development platforms. Coming up with the next release of the code, which will be hopefully sometime in the November kind of range of 2014, we will be running on Raspberry Pi. We’ve avoided running on the Raspberry Pi so far mainly because Wi-Fi support is really difficult and it’s actually more expensive overall than running on one of TP-Link routers. But we’re getting to the point where we need the power, we need the processing power and the storage capabilities of the SD card combined with the USB, really get some things done that we want to do. So the next release is going to have a Raspberry Pi in it.
Tim: Very nice.
Jason: Sure. So it’s open source pretty much top to bottom. It’s all open and the source code, everything that we’ve written, is all available on the website. If you go through the website, there is a link to our GitHub repo; it’s all there. But it’s kind of the base line of it. the base OS is OpenWrt. The web server is lighttpd. We’re using SQLite as our database server on the inside of the box and then we’re running kind of Perl, Python and PHP in various configurations to get the rest of the work done.
Tim: And you're looking for developers?
Jason: We’re always looking for developers. We’re an open source project. Every open source project is looking for developers. So if you want to play around on the box, it’s a really fun little project and I’d love to see some people pulling on GitHub and getting some updates done.
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Not really a file server distro, a wireless access point and router combination that intercepts any http/https request and sends it to a certain web server.
Re:Do we really need this? (Score:4, Insightful)
So, a file server service running on top of OpenWRT with a HTTP capture portal? I remember doing this with a WRT54G way back in the day...
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It's a piratebox. An open-source tool for this already exists.
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not quite, it doesn't allow uploading of files
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Do we really need yet another file server distro?
I'm a little more confused around the goal. It's designed to share eBooks in places that have no infrastructure, maybe not even a reliable electrical grid. Okay... but share with what? People in those parts of the world aren't running around with iPads.
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No, they're running around with phones. Phones really have revolutionized the world, all the way down to that one remote village with one phone to share with everyone to let them call in to see what price their crops will bring or whether heading into town will get them all slaughtered. I doubt they have an iphone 6+, and they probably have a candybar nokia, but cheap androids are only getting cheaper and will be in more hands as they do, especially when you have whatever idealist kids going around handin
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I don't have a smartphone. Are there places in the world where people pay for smartphones without any sort of data plan whatsoever?
Smartphones still can do a lot with just WiFi, and there are a lot of places with "free" wifi in generic metropolitan areas.
I know quite a few people with little-to-no data plan; i.e. many with no data-plan at all, and a significant number of people with very little (a few hundred MB)
Even the "small" data plans are used only for apps like Maps or Mass-Transit info (stuff that you may need while not near wifi); for all of their browsing and such while out of the house, they'll stop in at a Starbucks or som
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I doubt they have an iphone 6+, and they probably have a candybar nokia, but cheap androids are only getting cheaper and will be in more hands as they do, especially when you have whatever idealist kids going around handing them out.
There's probably still a lot of the candybar phones still around, but it was the Huawei IDEOS 8150 that took on the laptop-killer role in sub Saharan Africa all the way back in 2011. They were a quiet revolution in that part of the world, with locally-developed apps for everything from agriculture to healthcare, from disaster response to business and more. This stand-alone WiFi library would be ideal for those areas.
http://singularityhub.com/2011... [singularityhub.com]
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The best part is that they have "books" that don't require power, batteries, or firmware upgrades!
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No, the best part is the 3D rendering. It's as if you were looking at a real book with real pages!
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No, the best part is the 3D rendering. It's as if you were looking at a real book with real pages!
Revolutionary! Bringing the BookBook [youtube.com] to the masses is an admirable goal.
Why do kickstarter funders fall for this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why do kickstarter funders fall for this? (Score:5, Informative)
Justify my love (Score:2)
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You.... don't?
This one is too hard to defend. Sometimes I've been really enthusiastic about small and/or useless stuff on crowdfunding sites and early access stuff, but this is simply overpriced off the shelve hardware with a sticker...
Well, as long as there are people willing to send money to them, I suppose it's a "good" idea from a commercial point of view...
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To clarify: I want to buy my own $35 hardware and install the downloadable firmware on it, not pay a 300% markup for someone else to do it for me. The project itself looks neat, not the commercial product itself.
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These would be more interesting if they had more clever features. Uploading and downloading files doesn't seem interesting enough on its own.
Like maybe a kind of mesh network/anonymous proxy capability or some kind of distributed file system where you could subscribe or publish content that would get automatically replicated between devices when they came in range of each other. Maybe some kind of messaging/bulletin board communications.
It would take a critical mass of users for something like this to be
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Like maybe a kind of mesh network/anonymous proxy capability or some kind of distributed file system where you could subscribe or publish content that would get automatically replicated between devices when they came in range of each other. Maybe some kind of messaging/bulletin board communications.
Ooh, like a cross between Freenet [freenetproject.org] and FidoNet [fidonet.org]? I'm in. I don't know that this is the right software, but PirateBox shows a lot of potential and runs on the same hardware.
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I see several post on here that talk about how we've been able to do this for quite some time now. I can think of several other devices that do the same thing as what this guy made.
Yep, just like the Aptus Classroom Without Walls [col.org] (sorry, PDF only - not my site) or any one of a dozen other attempts at this.
I am right at this moment putting together the ground work to deliver tablets and computers to some of the most remote areas in the developing world, and we've been looking very carefully at this kind of stuff. Right now, we're leaning heavily toward just reappropriating the software and using better hardware. The big problem with this kind of server-in-a-dongle is that, although it'
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Wikipedia text is 40 GB (Score:2)
A recent article noted that the full text of Wikipedia is 40 GB. With a 64 GB or larger stick, you could have Wikipedia and a lot more.
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With that said, I am working to find interesting educational content, and have talked with Project RACHEL (http://rachel.worldpossible.org/) which works very well on a LibraryBox. I would love to be able to provide "content packs" of educational content for various levels and uses.
Interesting. We're evaluating RACHEL too.
But please do give some thought to performance. It's underrated as an issue.
Most people - even many of my colleagues - think that something, anything is better than nothing. And that's true, as far as it goes. Our immediate challenge is getting broadband internet to a part of the world that doesn't have any automation whatsoever, unless you count horses. It's quite remarkable the lengths they're willing to go to in order to see their children's lives improved. But i
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Is the performance limitation you mention about the number of wireless connections, or the processing power?
I tried several such devices with the intention of prototyping my own software, but either their CPUs were underpowered or they were unreliable. I got Debian on a GK802 for instance, installed in the internal SD-card so leaving the external slot free, with a USB WiFi dongle in addition to the internal WiFi so that it could work as a gateway to certain web content while serving its own applications. Th
I like PirateBox better (Score:4, Interesting)
http://piratebox.cc/ [piratebox.cc]
It's open source, anonymous, keeps no records, and acts as an off-line file-sharing system. you can pack it in your lunchbox, or even smaller. You can have it sitting in the bottom of your backpack, and have everyone in the food court up/downloading *ANYTHING* without worrying about getting nailed by "The Man". I don't think that it would be that hard to have it securely wipe it's storage clean at shutdown or startup, so there is no evidence of anything being stored on it, in case of seizure. It's been out for over a year and runs on multiple platforms.
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If you look at the docs for the librarybox, you will notice that it is just a modified piratebox.
Re:I like PirateBox better (Score:5, Informative)
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I just looooove when the people being bashed in the comments come up defending their position! Thanks a lot for all the info griffey!
Gadget users who think they are nerds... (Score:2)
...are gradually replacing computer operators, even on communities like Slashdot, because time and aging and dying and stuff. Those gadget users who don't understand GPOS's and don't want to...they want stuff like this. To me, it looks like a waste of time, but maybe they'll make some money. Not with my help, though.
So LibraryBox works like this? (Score:2)
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Wouldn't an old android phone with an SD card running a web server be the same thing, pretty much for free? It seems like it would be a great use for all those old phones sitting in drawers. They're compact, low power and come equipped with touchscreen interfaces, powerful processors, wifi capable and SD card slots (most of them).
Meet my old Galaxy S1. It also serves as a remote control for my router and my desktop.
I'm pretty sure all the software I use on it for those things is available on G-Play, even. There's probably better/more secure stuff from alternative sources, but I am fortunate enough to live in a building whose inhabitants seem blissfully unaware that there's even a 5GHz band (since I appear to have it all to myself), so I'm not real worried about anybody leeching copies of old Green Acres shows or what have you.
Bibliotecha (Score:2)
Bibliotecha is a framework to facilitate the local distribution of digital publications within a small community. It relies on a microcomputer running open-source software to serve books over a local wifi hotspot. Using the browser to connect to the library one can retrieve or donate texts. Bibliotecha proposes an alternative model of distribution of digital texts that allows specific communities to form and share their own collections.
http://bibliotecha.info/ [bibliotecha.info]