After the huge success of the first model of CryptoFaxPa officially launched on April, 1st 2018, a revamped and much more powerful version is now available. Yes, it's fully open source.
Plug it to a power socket and enjoy:
- GSM connection
- WiFi connection (whenever the HELP button is pressed, CryptoFaxPA will launch an access point that allows WiFi configuration)
- a HELP button which instantly prints installation instructions.
- a BLOCKCHAIN button which prints super-nerd blockchain information such as real-time Bitcoin value and other juicy things, along with a very pretty chart
- whenever a message is sent to the @CryptoFaxPA bot on Slack, it will be encrypted and sent to the device as a fax (actually, a cryptofax), and instantly printed
- while printing, a glorious 56k modem sound is emitted
- images are printed as well, and the Slack bot will actually show a preprocessed preview to the sender asking for confirmation - we don't want to send bad looking images
- in case a fax cannot be delivered to the device or printed successfully, it will be kept in spool
- Raspberry PI 3 B+
- Pipsta thermal printer
- 2 push buttons (and 2 10kOhm resistors)
- PAM8302 audio amplifier
- Loudspeakers
- GSM USB modem (such as the Huawei E3531)
- CryptoFaxPA_Leaflet_A3.pdf: leaflet
- CryptoFaxPA.scad: 3D model
- backend: contains the bot that reacts to Slack messages and preprocesses them before adding them to a MQTT queue
- client: contains the client that runs on the CryptoFaxPA device
- common: contains common code shared by the other components
- wificonf: contains the WiFi configuration tool
- overlay: contains the files to be replaced on a vanilla Raspbian Stretch
For the development cycle on the board, both wificonf and client have a
deploy.sh script that you can use to test (you might want to stop services
on the board using systemctl stop cryptofaxpa or systemctl stop client).
Backend development is a little hairy as there's currently no staging
environment. Assuming you have access to all production configuration keys,
you probably want to use foreman (or goreman) with backend/Procfile.dev,
after stopping the production instance.
A release is cut by running ./release.sh from the top-level. The release is
GPG-signed with a restricted set of authors (maintainers) and published as
release asset on GitHub. The CryptoFaxPA will auto-update checking for new
releases every hour (or can be manually triggered through the wificonf web
interface).
- Giovanni Bajo (software)
- Laura Bordin (packaging & leaflet)
- Matteo De Santi (product design & packaging)
- Elisabetta Pique' (project manager)
- Alessandro Ranellucci (hardware & software)