CryptoFaxPA 2.0 📠

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.

Marketing pictures

Configuration panel

How it works

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

Bill of materials:

• 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)

Repository contents:

• 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

Compilation

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.

Software release

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).

Authors

• Giovanni Bajo (software)
• Laura Bordin (packaging & leaflet)
• Matteo De Santi (product design & packaging)
• Elisabetta Pique' (project manager)
• Alessandro Ranellucci (hardware & software)