RACHEL-Pi custom build project

In draft | Still working on it.

Central Students Community Awareness to Kupiano Secondary School:  RACHEL trial

From the 14 to 15 November, the Central Students Association of DWU conducted a community awareness project at Kupiano Secondary School. Approximately 180km away from Port Moresby taking around 4-5 hours’ drive, the school is just within the vicinity of the Kupiano station in the Rigo-Abau district of Central Province.

The objective was to disseminate information about DWU and other tertiary institutions in Madang Province. Give talks on social issues our communities face and how these issues could be addressed. Furthermore, they planned as part of this community awareness to give something to the school. The idea was to begin with Kupiano this year 2018, and then do the same for other secondary schools around Central province.

The main problem however was funding to carry out this project. Despite a proposal and letter seeking funding from the Central provincial government, no funding was forthcoming. The students organized themselves and started to raise funds with the support from staff, students and families within DWU and the Madang community. This presented an opportunity for RACHEL to be trialed. In fact, RACHEL came about as an option because there wasn’t enough donated books received. The students than planned to introduce RACHEL and then give the few donated reading books to add to their existing library.

The next challenge was choosing the RACHEL server. For this project, we decided to trial the RACHEL-Pi. Funding was our biggest drawback so we had to choose between two options; purchasing the pre-built device from the WorldPossible online store or purchase the raspberry pi device online with accessories and do a custom-build. We chose the latter as it was an inexpensive option. This was going to be a pilot project.

 

What equipment/software is contained in this custom-built Rachel Pi server?

We decided to custom build the RACHEL-Pi (as it was an inexpensive option) using the following components.

Item	Qty	Cost
Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ Rev 1.1 5v power adapter included.	1	K120.00 (A$48.99) Bought here on Ebay
Wi-Pi USB Wireless adapter	1	K40.00 (A$19.95)
64GB Micro-SD Card	1	K155.00 Bought at the local shop (Papindo)
Raspberry Pi clear case	1	K20.00 ($7.99)
58GB of educational resources[1]	N/A	Free

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[1] Downloaded from here (http://rachelfriends.org/downloads/public_ftp/rachelpi_64EN/) with the help of DWU ICT. (Staff and students have download limits thus we asked ICT to help us).

Figure 4. The custom-built RACHEL-Pi components: Raspberry Pi 3 B+ with the Wi-Pi, 5v power adapter and 64GB microSD card.

Raspberry Pi hardware specifications: Raspberry Pi 3 B+: 1.4GHz 64-bit quad-core processor, dual-band w/LAN, Bluetooth 4.2/BLE, FastEthernet, PoE support (with separate PoE HAT)

The cost of purchasing the pre-built RACHEL-Pi is $169.00 (USD) which when converted to PGK amounts to K550.77 plus shipping totaled to around K800.

With our custom build RACHEL-Pi, it only cost less than K500 for this device with the accessories. The opportunity cost to this option is that given the limited processing power of the raspberry pi (to act as a server) used it has the capacity to allow at least between ten (10) to fifteen users to connect to it at any single time with either their own smartphone, tablet or laptop so. More users than this would result in slower response time from the device. Steps showing how to write the RACHEL-Pi image to the microSD card are in Appendix 1.

This is an inexpensive option if compared to the cost of purchasing at least ten secondhand desktop computers with monitor, mouse and keyboard. It is energy efficient and cost effective. An alternative and future plan is to purchase the RACHEL-Plus for the next school project.