[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.