✧*｡ﾟ☆ﾟ.*｡ﾟThe Inspiration + the Idea ✧*｡ﾟ☆ﾟ.*｡ﾟ
…A lot of waste occurs using infrastructures built with the principles of the capitalist market. Many mobile operators become active in the same area… The same holds true for the home WiFi routers that are strictly personal, which is both unnecessary (a well-placed router could easily serve more than one apartment), wasteful (in terms of hardware and energy)… In a commons-based economy, such access infrastructure could be shared, allowing apartment blocks to install only the necessary number of wireless routers.
Panayotis Antoniadis. The Organic Internet: Building Communications Networks from the Grassroots
I was very inspired by the reading on community/DIY networking and the quote above resonated with me throughout several weeks of class. I’ve also been inspired by the community memory project. I don’t often connect with my neighbors, but would love to have a relationship where we share with each other. As I entered this project, some of the questions that motivated me were:
- What does sharing look like at an apartment-building level?
- What kind of digital resources would enable neighbors to share with each other?
- What would it look like to move toward sharing networking infrastructure with neighbors?
- Instead of each neighbor having their own routers, what would it look like to share a Wi-FI access point between two, or three, or four apartments within the same building?
My original idea was to use my tiny raspberry pi to host a Wi-Fi access point that I could share with my neighbors. A few years ago, I heard about Pi-Hole (an adblocker that works at a network level instead of from a browser — which was my original inspiration for obtaining an RPi before class started). So I wanted to smash these two ideas together. Offer a building-level Wi-Fi access point that also blocks ads. Maybe host a Community-Memory inspired website that’s only available when you’re connected to building Wi-Fi that allows neighbors to request things they need or offer things they can share. In looking through the previous class’s blog posts, I found two projects (By Alexa Kirchner and Lauren St. Clair) that were similar to mine and thankfully included links to tutorials they were following. Both projects set up captive portals, which was something I was slightly interested in how to do.
✧*｡ﾟ☆ﾟ.*｡ﾟThe Execution ✧*｡ﾟ☆ﾟ.*｡ﾟ
The final* idea came together in my head. I wanted to create a wi-fi access point that had a captive portal and share it with my neighbors. When you connect with the wi-fi the captive portal would describe the motivation for the project, have links to readings about sharing networking resources as well as links to maintaining privacy/security on shared wi-fi connections.
So I set out with my tiny RPi and followed the first half of this tutorial. I was able to successfully set up another Wi-Fi access point that had adblocking capabilities. I used it around my apartment for 2-3 days and soon realized the range actually wasn’t that strong.