At Coolab we work with, usually, rural communities, where connectivity is a challenge. For years we’ve collaborated with several remote villages on mesh projects using the Libre Router for WiFi and Meshtastic for LoRa networks.
One effective strategy we’ve been using for years is to use single-board-computers to create community servers, a digital territory where the local community has the say. We’ve been curating several services and methodos on how to present them in a way that makes sense to people who are new to the digital world.
Our first stack has been with Docker and docker-compose which is alive at Gitlab. Some of the challenges we’ve faced has been running Docker on older SBCs, monitoring the deployed devices and updating them remotely. Balena of course solves all those problems, and so we’ve been migrating to Balena.
Through this project we’ve been exploring Open Balena, where we’ve started our own version of an Open Dashboard. We hope to have a prototype deployed to the Portal Sem Porteiras community network soon, with video documentations teaching other communities on how to deploy their own.
As someone who has met a number of people from Coolab and the LibreRouter project at the Battlemesh events, I’m excited to see them show up here as well
The new project sounds promising, keep up the good work!
That’s awesome @TJvV, you probably met Hiure. I’m staying at his house and we’ve been hacking together on Balena for weeks now.
I stumbled uppon Razikus’s dashboard, but wasn’t able to get it to work. So I just started my own, as an experiment to better understand the overrall capabilities of Open Balena and the SDK.
The only challenges we’re facing with this project now are:
We ran a Jurubeba instance in offline-mode here at the community mesh for a week, but accidently lost all the content when we exited offline-mode. So we just started running another instance in production with the latest release of Jurubeba, and we’re pretty satisfied with the stack.
Our concern is just if all data might be erased again for any reason, but we’re confident that won’t happen in production mode, right? Or should we setup an external storage strategy?
Our next steps for this project would be:
to add default configs for a plug-and-play experience
to add better documentation on how to configure the community media-server
to provide support for other communities trying this out
