FreedomBone: How to turn your BeagleBone Black into a personal communications server #beagleboneblack @TXInstruments @beagleboardorg
Bob Mottram made this great tutorial on how to turn your BeagleBone Black into a FreedomBox-like personal communications server.
If you look at it from an engineering perspective, an iterative perspective, it’s clear that you have to try something rather than do nothing.
– Edward J. Snowden
Today many of us rely upon “free” services in the cloud, such as Gmail, Facebook, Google+ and so on. It might appear that these services are indispensible infrastructure of the modern internet, but actually they’re not strictly needed and the amount of value which they deliver to the average internet user is very marginal. It is possible to be a citizen of the internet and yet not use those things – to disintermediate the most well known companies and cut out their prurient or merely cringeworthy business models.
FreedomBone is a personal home communications server based upon the BeagleBone Black hardware. It’s small and cheap and will allow you to use email, have your own web site and do social networking in a federated way without needing to rely upon any intermediary companies other than your ISP.
You should consider doing this if you are a freedom-oriented sort of person and you want to maintain sovereignty over your information. Laws in many places in the world consider you to have relinquished any property rights over data which you put onto a server not owned by youself (i.e. owned by a third party, such as Google or Facebook).
If you don’t like the idea of having all your communications intercepted and investigated by the Surveillance State then you should consider running a FreedomBone. If your profession involves maintaining confidentiality as an essential feature, such as legal or medical services, counselling, teaching or any sort of activism then you should consider running a FreedomBone.
Each Tuesday is BeagleBone Black Day here at Adafruit! What is the BeagleBone? The BeagleBones are a line of affordable single-board Linux computers (SBCs) created by Texas Instruments. New to the Bone? Grab one of our Adafruit BeagleBone Black Starter Packs and check out our extensive resources available on the Adafruit Learning System including a guide to setting up the Adafruit BeagleBone IO Python Library. We have a number of Bone accessories including add-on shields (called “capes”) and USB devices to help you do even more with your SBC. Need a nice display to go along with your Bone? Check out our fine selection of HDMI displays, we’ve tested all of them with the Beagle Bone Black!
Adafruit has had paid day off for voting for our team for years, if you need help getting that going for your organization, let us know – we can share how and why we did this as well as the good results. Here are some resources for voting by mail, voting in person, and some NY resources for our NY based teams as well. If there are additional resources to add, please let us know – adafruit.com/vote
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
