Solarpunk social hardware with Scuttlebutt

Another month flashes by! The PeachCloud OpenCollective balance has grown to $184.41 thanks to our fantastic supporters. Thank you to Anders Jensen for your first-time contribution and Martin G for your continued support!

The highlight of our past month has been the announcement of the finalized budget for the Handshake / ACCESS grant, with PeachCloud having been allocated approximately €3,245. This process began with a $100,000 grant made by Handshake (an experimental peer-to-peer root DNS) to the SSB (Scuttlebutt) community. A deliberate and democratic process emerged as a Council of elected Scuttlebutt participants shaped the budget over months of thoughtful deliberation. We are grateful for the support and for the many, many hours of hard work put in by the Council. We are also grateful to our peers for their engagement in the process and their belief in PeachCloud. Thank you!

Further budget details can be seen in this tweet by André Staltz.

In terms of technical progress, here are some of the highlights of the past month of work:

• Micro-service improvements:
• peach-buttons: refactored to use the GPIO character device ABI (replaces the deprecated sysfs interface) and implemented pubsub JSON-RPC functionality over websockets
• peach-network: refactored to use wpactrl for network interface control
• Logging: all microservices now implement selective logging (set via environment variables)
• Micro-service additions:
• peach-dyndns-host: a DNS server to host the names of guests with changing IP addresses
• peach-menu: a menu handler for the physical interface of PeachCloud (OLED + push-buttons)

We are currently working to improve and standardize error-handling for the aforementioned micro-services, all of which are written in Rust and can be found on the PeachCloud organization GitHub page.

In an exciting first for the PeachCloud team, Mikey (dinosaur) published their first Rust crate: Nest - a library to use your filesystem as a nested data store. Congratulations Mikey! Nest is intended to serve as the primary configuration storage mechanism for PeachCloud.

We will continue working on the micro-service modules, packaging up the PeachCloud stack for Debian, and are also busy working on a new funding proposal behind the scenes. More about that in our next update!

Until next time, much love from the PeachCloud team!