Show HN: Off-grid web server for the developing world | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Off-grid web server for the developing world

challengepost.com

47 pointsMichaelAO33 comments

I've actually been playing around with a local network consisting of a single wifi router attached to an old netbook as a server. Have you considered attaching an off the self wifi router attached to an external battery pack?

There are economies of scale on external battery packs that run 12v(common wifi router DC voltage) and marine batteries also can run 12v. You could create a new power cable that never does the dc to ac conversion and use that battery pack for the wifi. Then you could run the raspberry pi or other system as the server itself.

Nice idea and don't worry about the Africa haters. Plenty of stuff is originally made for mid 20s SF techies that ends up being useful for a whole lot of other people.

Thanks for the tip! Exactly the info we were looking for when we posted on HN :)

Great to hear. I haven't looked into the project fully, so I'll apologize in advance if you already have a solution for what I describe below.

I used a catch all DNS wildcard with a dnsmasq rule which I set up on a DD-WRT flashed router.

address=/#/192.168.11.2

That IP was the IP of my server. The nice part of that rule is that many people will type in google.com or something similar when they find your open wifi spot assuming they are connected to the web. The wildcard will resolve that the the IP of the local server and send them there automatically. That can be the landing page of the network that introduces things, provides links etc.

We ended up using an mDNS (http://www.avahi.org/) that pointed towards hostname.local - not perfect, but we didn't have to use the IP address anymore. The catch all is a much better idea.

> Then you could run the raspberry pi or other system as the server itself.

Or use the router as the server too. A $50 router will have a USB port (higher quality than the RPi's) and a 500MHz MIPS cpu that is not too far behind the antiquated ARMv6 core in the Pi.

I've done a little similar work with using routers off-grid: http://kmkeen.com/chatbox/

For creating decentralized mesh networks, it might help to look at what the freifunk project has done. Freifunk is a community project that builds open mesh networks (mostly in Germany) using cheap (€15-20 range) off the shelf routers. The routers usually provide two wifi networks, an open access point as well as a mesh interface that will mesh with all other access points in range.

The used firmware (called "Gluon") is based on OpenWRT and all open source:

http://gluon.readthedocs.org/en/v2014.3/ https://github.com/freifunk-gluon/gluon

http://freifunk.net/en/

Apart from that, for communicating with systems that have no or only temporary internet access, the pretty ancient UUCP protocol comes to mind:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP

I actually had my first email and news accounts subscribed over the UUCP protocol. The main advantage of UUCP is that it will queue all data destined for a remote system and asynchronously transfer everything when a system is reachable. It is also possible to relay data using multiple hops that are not online at the same time. It was used mostly with dial up systems that were only online during data transfers.

So with UUCP it might be possible to implement a sort of drive-by update where a mobile node (maybe installed in a car) can connect to a local server, exchange incoming/outgoing messages and relay them to the node in the next village when the driver moves on.

Thanks for the resources! We will definitely check them out

Be sure to do some load testing with multiple simultaneous users! In my experience using a Pi as a Wi-Fi hotspot can be pretty unreliable.

Good point. The Pi made sense for the hackathon. What type of wifi antenna have you used? http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=76604

This could be great - what do you need, and how do we help?

Thank you! At this point, we're going to work on the code base and experiment with different hardware setups before deploying. It'd be great if others would contribute on github and build their own. Other than that, helping us connect with organizations that might benefit from this type of technology would be great.

Have a look at the recently announced Global Learning XPRIZE (see http://www.xprize.org/press-release/gordon-brown-endorses-15... ). Soon teams will register and some could be interested. Or run/join a team.

This recent successful Kickstarter may have covered some of the bases you're trying to cover. http://www.brck.com/#thebrck

I'm really glad that a lot of hackathon projects are addressing YC's RFS categories, a lot of good can come out of these.

We built this over the weekend at Hack the North. All of the code, along with an SD image for the Pi can be found on github: https://github.com/alisha/seed It was a really fun project and the hackathon was great - Sam Altman made a cameo! Feel free to ask any questions.

Hey! I was at the talk during Hack the North in which you practiced your pitch. Awesome job!

Thanks! Have you recovered from the weekend yet? It was intense. What'd you built?

My problem with all the save Africa hardware/software projects, is they seem to be made by people who don't live in Africa. I'm not confident they even have a grip on what the customers actually want or need.

Everybody in Africa has portable devices, they are just missing this useless $10 hotspot gimmick with pre-loaded Wikipedia to get their information on Ebola.

The project did work on palm os so I'm assuming it would work on almost any other device as well

http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/04/tech/mobile/africa-mobile-opin...

Did you just link to an article about people in South Africa using mobile phones in 2012? You realize that SA has been rolling out good infrastructure for a while now? Right?

Do you think people in South Africa need this thing to read about Ebola in 2014? How ignorant are you really?

Signed up 3 hours ago. Surprise.

Of course not, as the project isn't geared for people with existing infrastructure that allow them to access the Internet without any problem. Rather it is for the community that may have a mobile device but cannot access the Internet as easily. Of course not all people in such developing countries would have a mobile device but if we take the scope a little big bigger and say, a village, then there is a higher chance of a mobile device within such a community. Through this, we hope that information may be much more accessible to such audiences. It was my bad about that link, wasn't the most appropriate one.

I appreciate your critique (seriously), but keep in mind this project was built in 36 hours by four college and high school students. We clearly haven't thought through all the details and would appreciate constructive feedback. There are several projects similar to this that seem to be useful so I don't think we're completely off base (http://www.raspberrypi.org/the-kingdom-of-bhutans-first-pi-a...).

But if you really think this project is a 'useless gimmick' then there's not much more to talk about.

To be honest, we don't. We really do want to work with the people who do know though. Obviously some of the stuff we included for v1 doesn't make sense for certain regions, and we want to address this before any major deployment.

There's a mediawiki project called Afripédia [0] whose goal is kind of similar: put the whole wikipedia on a drive and install it on a pogoplug in multiple places in french-speaking African countries where accessibility is close to nil.

On the technical side they "only" have a wikipedia dump for the moment, but on the project side they have had some success in deploying it, so maybe you can have a look at what they do (warning: Afripédia is made by and for french-speaking people, you may have to learn it :)

[0] https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/06/28/afripedia-collaboratio...

Why is Linux/Nginx/MySQL/PHP abbreviated LEMP?

The E is for Nginx, which is pronounced "Engine X"

My android phone can do just that.... It provides WIFI router, hosts USB hdd...

I'm surprised it wasn't done in Node.JS and a "NoSQL" DB.

> We've specifically implemented an Ebola prevention section, as Seed 1.0 will be deployed in Africa.

Stop using Africa for your advancement. You obviously live in a bubble.

Not trying to "use" Africa. Just trying to make something that could help people. The description is a little rough but I truly believe that once we start talking with the groups that have specific requirements for each region, these devices could do some good.

What in the world are you talking about.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com