Solenoid’s friend is going to Malawi to teach the staff of an orphanage to use computers in order to make their administrative tasks easier. The problem: they don’t have computers or money to buy them, what they do have is a flimsy power grid that goes down every now and then.
The Raspberry Pi 3 just came out with a decent CPU and Wi-Fi, enough to do simple tasks such as browsing, emailing and various light office work. That’s the idea behind the dirt-cheap, but decent, workstation and this project page goes through the couple of hacks that Solenoid did to get the cost as low as possible.
Since the Hackaday challenge 2016: “Build something that matters” just started it was a good opportunity to participate.