Solarpunk social hardware with Scuttlebutt

Warm greetings from the PeachCloud team! This update is a 2-for-1, covering progress made in May and June. Thank you to all of our kind peers who support and have supported PeachCloud on our journey to return (cloud) computing back into our homes and local communities in a way which fosters increased trust in one another and the socio-technical systems we inhabit. A warm welcome and big thanks go to Seán who began contributing in May!

glyph completed 35 hours of work in May: 15 towards code ($375) and 20 towards documentation ($800 NZD). The documentation work was funded by the Scuttlebutt Maintenance Grant. A further 38 hours of coding work were completed in June ($950). The PeachCloud OpenCollective balance currently stands at $262.68.

Work over these past two months has been fairly evenly distributed between documentation - both in terms of code comments and developer documentation, device configuration and microservice improvements.

A brief outline of accomplishments during this period:

• The developer documentation Git book has been updated and deployed to docs.peachcloud.org
• Updated hardware section with GPIO pinout and configuration information, including Device Tree Overlay (DTC) patching for configuring the Real-Time Clock (RTC)
• New section on Debian packaging of microservices
• Hosting information can be found in the peach-devdocs repo
• It is now possible to delete access point credentials and modify existing network credentials via the web interface
• This completes the foundational networking interface for PeachCloud :)
• The device statistics view of the web interface now shows microservice status for networking, OLED and system statistics
• The cross-compilation workflow has been determined for compiling microservices
• The peach-network API has been refactored and is now more consistent and intuitive
• Extensive documentation comments have been added to peach-network and other microservices
• peach-web has been refactored for improved modularity
• Unobstructive JavaScript has been added to handle all network-related form submissions
• Plus lots of other minor improvements!

Work in the month ahead will focus on the homepage of the web interface, in-app help and authentication. glyph will also be assessing the state of the Go and Rust Scuttlebutt implementations and exploring hardware design mock-ups for the PeachCloud device. Fun and exciting times ahead!

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