FreedomBox interested in Mozilla Things gateway

Mozilla IoT
#1

The FreedomBox is a Linux Image for the Raspberry Pi and other single-board computers. It allows to run complex server applications like wikis and chat services to be run from inside your home.

A box can be created by putting their Linux image onto an SD card and putting it into an existing Raspberry Pi, or buying their pre-installed box. One of their markets is rural India.

Danny, the Vice President for Product & Development, got in contact with me to chat about the possibility of the Mozilla Things gateway on the Freedombox.

I don’t recommend releasing the gateway to the box before the Web of Things API has been standardized, but I recommend to start build tests now. The FreedomBox uses the Debian repository and has contacts to Debian maintainers to help with the approval steps for a Web of Things gateway. Alternatively, distro-independent systems like AppImage or Flatpak could be utilized. The gateway would likely need to use a local TCP port and get proxied by the Apache server that the FreedomBox runs.

Coming up with an automated build script for Debian packages or AppImage, is a cool project to help adoption and make the gateway run in parallel with other web servers.

1 Like
#2

This would definitely be cool. A couple thoughts:

  1. We’ve had a lot of interest in packaging for other platforms, but our internal team just doesn’t have the time or resources to handle this. We do provide a Docker image which should be usable anywhere, so maybe that’s a good option?
  2. Reverse proxying has also proven tricky, because our routes overlap between JSON (API) routes, UI routes, and websocket routes.