Pin – decentralized web hosting mesh for Raspberry Pi | Hacker News Reader

Pin – decentralized web hosting mesh for Raspberry Pi

github.com

2 pointsjustj19796 comments

I maintain a project where Raspberry Pis or other Debian Systems advertise themselves on a LAN with UDP beacons and auto-discover each other, pair and sync with Ktor SSE. I built it in Kotlin Multiplatform so there's android, ios, desktop and web front ends.

Similar concept where it's decentralized with a Web (WASM) front end showing all of your sensors and devices as "nodes" with state machines and a bunch of functions like alerts, python lambas, cron tasks, mqtt - it's a beast: https://krillswarm.com

Syncing was the hard part so I with you, I can either pull out that part into a library you can use or i'll use yours when it's ready. Each Pi generates a self signed cert other servers download and trust for https everywhere.

If you're interested I also just put out an OSS gRPC bridge specifically for RPi the essentially wraps pi4j 4.x using the new PPE and exposes it's apis over gRPC:

https://github.com/bsautner/krill-oss/tree/main/pi4j-ktx-ser...

The code has been worked out for the base platform. I worked on it all weekend. 3 major milestones left. Make a dedicated web browser, generate the app, and remove the current data base dependancy. This is a big project. I'm excited to work on it and get it done. My own RPi 4 is currently running it in the background with no issue. It is still running other periferals without a challange. The goal is to make this app as scaleable as the user defines. I look forward to hearing feedback from other developers and users.

PiN is an open-source project launching today (PI Day) that builds a decentralized web hosting network on Raspberry Pis and any device that wants to participate.

Technical stack: - Go daemon (meshd) using libp2p + Kademlia DHT - Content-addressed storage (SHA-256 CIDs) - Proof-of-service ledger in SQLite with gossip-based sync - Tauri app for resource scheduling - nginx embedded for HTTP serving

Design questions I'd love feedback on: - Is libp2p overhead acceptable on a Pi Zero? - Gossip vs lightweight BFT consensus at scale? - 24-hour epochs for Hash calculation — right granularity?

Spec: github.com/pin-network/pin-network/blob/main/docs/SPEC.md

libp2p overhead isn't acceptable on any system.

Two questions: Is libp2p overhead acceptable on a Pi Zero? Gossip vs BFT consensus for the ledger at scale?

lip2p is not really usable as you'll see a bit further. The overhead is huge and phones will quickly be drained out of battery from trying to use it.

Maybe with PI zero always connected to the power this isn't an issue.

You are welcome to visit the https://geogram.radio to get ideas or maybe to help develop the project (it is open source). It does decentralized web hosting, as well as blogs, chat, docs, meetings, etc over other links besides internet like bluetooth, radio and other mesh configurations.

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