After some time I’ve found a way to upcycle Chromebooks to run the latest version of Ubuntu and boot to an external USB drive while maintaining the ChromeOS. The WiFi chips in these models also can create their own wifi networks so they can be short range routers.
What does this actually mean? Instead of requiring new hardware like a raspberry pi, we can take old Chromebooks that schools get rid of in the thousands and actually reuse them to create portable micro servers. Pack them full of offline books, maps, wikis, etc.
There is a major upside compared to using an old Chromebook over a raspberry pi, mainly that it's actually cheaper and can be free depending on how you source your chromebooks. I got 10 at $30 each which is cheaper than a pi or a pi alternative.
The battery life is also insane. I used it for close to 12 hours and it didn't even hit 50% battery loss. They also take very little time to charge so I'm interested to see how much power they might take up while attached to the off grid solar array.
So the plan is to make the docs and work some more on making these into portable offgrid information stations and packing them with info. https://anarchosolarpunk.substack.com/p/offgridserveruses
#solarpunk #permacomputing
@hydroponictrash So wait, can you just do this with any chromebook?
@mauve Pretty much, some might be incompatible but I have no clue which ones would be. Think the method I used only works for Intel based Chromebooks but there are only like 10 Chromebook models that use ARM so it should work for most.