Solarpunk social hardware with Scuttlebutt

Hearty greetings from the PeachCloud team! Thank you to all of our peers and friends who continue to support us in our work.

First, a quick update on the work that has been done since our last newsletter update: glyph completed a total of 131 hours of work ($3275) over the months of July, August, September and October. He also spent 12 hours working on the PeachCloud Developer Documentation. The PeachCloud OpenCollective balance currently stands at $243.09.

News

The most exciting recent update is the onboarding of Max Fowler (@notplants) as a volunteer contributor to the project. Max and glyph have previously connected over mycology and are now working together to move PeachCloud forward. This collaborative partnership has already served as impetus to improve the documentation and scripts associated with deploying a fresh installation of the PeachCloud system.

We now have development setups on two continents :)

Close-up of a Raspberry Pi with an attached OLED display reading: "Welcome to PeachCloud" (first line) and "Born in cypherspace" (second line).

A Raspberry Pi connected to a small HDMI display, keyboard and mouse on a wooden desk. There is a tangle of cables emanating from the small computer. Piles of papers and books appear on a shelf in the background.

Mix Irving (@mixmix / @whimful) has also been supporting glyph in improving project management and task prioritisation. Friends are the best <3

Previous work

A brief summary of work conducted since the last newsletter update:

• UI and styling updates to peach-web and the pattern library
• Bug fix for deleting a WiFi network from the web interface
• A new microservice (peach-monitor) and associated data usage view in the web interface (screenshot below)
• Evaluation of Kuska-ssb (both the SSB library and solar - a minimal Scuttlebutt implementation in Rust)
• Documentation updates (story, features, design principles, OS configuration)
• A new repo for configuration and deployment scripts (peach-config)

Screenshot showing the Network Data Usage view of the PeachCloud user interface. A usage total is displayed in MB. There are input boxes and corresponding checkboxes to set warning and cutoff thresholds. Below the input boxes are buttons: "Update" and "Cancel".

Screenshot showing the Device Status view of the PeachCloud user interface. There is a row of three rounded boxes with green borders showing "ONLINE" status for Networking, Display and Statistics. Below that are three meter bars depicting CPU, Memory and Disk usage, with a blue-bordered, rounded box showing system uptime at the bottom.

The road ahead

Current work is focused on improving developer onboarding and making workflows more efficient. This includes automation of documentation deployment, software compilation, package building and deployment. This work should make it much easier for future contributors and the first wave of alpha testers to get up-and-running with minimal friction.

By the time the next newsletter is released we should have a Debian repository deployed for easy downloading and updating of PeachCloud software (packaged as .deb files). We are also aiming to evaluate the current state of the Rust Scuttlebutt ecosystem and draw-up the specifications for the minimal PeachCloud sbot.

Thank you for reading our update and for your continued support. Until next time, much love from the PeachCloud team!