
LibraryBox: Portable Private Digital Distribution - Tomte
http://librarybox.us/index.php
======
griffey
Hello all! I'm the creator and director of the LibraryBox project. Sadly, the
project is mostly ceased for a handful of reasons. As noted here, Matthias
stopped production of Piratebox code, which was the underlying basis for
LibraryBox.

When the FCC passed the rule a few years back that 5Ghz chipsets had to be
firmware locked, the hardware that we mostly relied on dried up. Rather than
producing 2.4-only devices or leaving the 2.4 unlocked, manufacturers like TP-
Link just firmware locked everything. This killed the MR3040 and MR3020, and
without those as primary hardware targets, development stalled.

LibraryBox never pivoted to the RPi, for a few reasons...the biggest being
that for most of our development, the RPi didn't have onboard wifi, and driver
support for USB wifi dongles was a horrorshow. The other big driver was that
LibraryBox always focused on the lowest possible price point devices, and the
RPi was never the cheapest, so it was never our focus.

The project is "dead", in that there's no ongoing development (unless someone
out there wants to jump into the GitHub). But I'm keeping it up because there
are still pockets of the hardware out there in the world that people might
want to convert.

~~~
FerretFred
That's a shame, and although I never set up a LibraryBox, got some very good
ideas from the concept. Thanks for the opportunity and inspiration though!

I also ran a PirateBox for a while and recently set up a "sharebox" based on
an Onion Omega 2P which worked well. The biggest obstacles I found were that
people were generally unwilling to connect to an unsecure wireless access
point, even when the SSID was more "benign" than "PirateBox". Also, the
struggle to deal with the increasing de-popularisation of HTTP in favour of
HTTPS. Android phones also tended to not want to stay connected to devices
that "weren't connected to the Internet".

The irony is that with the way the online world's going, the need for
LibraryBox and similar devices is going to be greater than ever.

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rasengan0
This is a lovely project. I made a couple of these back in the day but sadly
PirateBox on which LibraryBox was based on, ceased development as the tireless
dedicated Matthias Strubel
[https://github.com/MaStr](https://github.com/MaStr) had to restore freetime
[https://forum.piratebox.cc/read.php?9,23070](https://forum.piratebox.cc/read.php?9,23070)

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intopieces
I can't seem to reliably source the hardware mentioned on the site. Mainly,
the TP-Link MR3040. I want to set a few of these up to distribute ebooks for
free. Anyone have experience with the other HW listed in the "Downloads"
section?

~~~
tfolbrecht
It’s an older model, very popular for pirate box etc.

You can find similar openwrt compatible hardware on openwrts hardware page.
Just make sure it has usb and similar specs.

~~~
lrpublic
Raspberry PI including Zero W seems to be supported by openWrt
[https://openwrt.org/toh/raspberry_pi_foundation/raspberry_pi](https://openwrt.org/toh/raspberry_pi_foundation/raspberry_pi)

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jively
I love this project, I've always wanted to combine something like this with a
mesh network. Then you can provide "village-wide" WANs that are repositories
for local Info (for residents and tourists).

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m-p-3
Interesting, I was recently looking for an alternative to the recently
abandoned PirateBox.

