Donation box

Free Software, Open Hardware , Open Design Project for physical crowdfunding.

Idea

Problem

During the last few years, especially in Greece, many communities and initiatives have tried to do things in many different fields of interest. Often times, these teams will sooner or later need some funding in order to fulfill their goals. Some of them organize events, some run online crowdfunding campains and some also find several new ways to cover their needs. From our experience, online crowdfunding does not work as expected, most of the time. People are hesitating to put all their details online, especially if they choose to donate a small amount, or some may not have a debit or credit card to do that. Eventually, most of these people prefer to give their donations in cash, in person or into a physical box somewhere. Of course, many donation boxes, usually managed by NGOs, already exist in public places, shops and such places. The problem with these boxes is that they do not offer much information about the organization that asks for money, nor do they offer transparency about what happens to the donations, who are the organization, or how much money they need. Due to the lack of possible ways to convey sufficient information, traditional donation boxes are not being used by teams that focus on a specific project, because people can not understand what the project exactly is.

Solution

In order to solve the above problems, we came up with the idea of a screen-enabled interactive donation box. The box can run several projects or causes that are asking for donations. It provides information (text, images, video) for each project. It provides real-time information about the progress (donations accepted, donations needed, finishing date). Donations are recorded and if users choose so, they can be registered to keep in touch with the project for which they donated. The box also can issue receipts for each donation. Connecting several donation boxes to an online service can add more value to each box and all the projects that are running, as a project can be created online and activated in several boxes in several locations simultaneously. This way, we hope to help NGOs, social initiatives and others, to achieve their goals and their fulfil their ideas. By offering a platform for crowdfunding that exists in physical, public spaces, we are offering a different and more direct connection between projects asking for help and people willing to help.

Technical Description

Hardware

The current development is based on the initial following design:

• A programmable coint acceptor
• Arduino compatible, connected to the coin acceptor and translating the readings to something more readable (e.g. EUR|2.00)
• A Raspberry Pi connected through serial to the Arduino and running this software.
• A tablet that connects through WiFi to the Raspberry Pi (that acts as a hot spot) and loads the Wordpress site.
• A PCB for power distribution and connecting the ATtiny used to Pi.
• The box design to house the above and collect the coins.

Software

The software has three items.

• The Serial2DB which is a simple deamon written in python which listens on the serial port for messages from the Arduino which is connected to the coin acceptor and writes all entries to an SQL DB.
• The wsServer which is a WebSocket server written in python which reads the SQL DB for new entries and then notifies any connected websocket clients of these. Additionally listens for any donations made and alters accordingly the SQL DB.
• The Wordpress widgets and theme customizations. Which are used for offering an improved user experience based on the design assumption that the wordpress site is running on a 10" tablet. The theme is currently based on Influence and there are several widgets developed to enhance the sidebar. Several plug ins needed for the current implementation and features are already under the plugins folder.

Installation

• Arduino
  • Flash with this code.
• Raspberry Pi
  • Set up DHCP
  • Set up DNS
  • Set up WiFi access point (http://elinux.org/RPI-Wireless-Hotspot)
  • Set up IP forwarding
  • Install python tornado
  • (Printer) sudo apt-get install python-serial python-imaging python-unidecode
  • Copy repository and start Serial2DB & wsServer.
  • Install lighthttpd
  • Install MySQL
  • Create custom DB tables. Run the create_tables.sql
  • Install PHP
  • Set up Wordpress
  • Add Influence theme
  • Add included child theme & plugins
  • Activate plugins
  • Remove default widgets
  • Import widgets
  • Create custom fields 'Goal' as number and 'Finish Date' as date
  • Create post
    • Create category 'projects' and select it

NOTE: Currently testing the PressPi image.

• Android Tablet
  • Install Firefox
  • Connect to WiFi running on the Pi.
  • Load home page

Developers

For those interested more in how things work or are interested in contributing to the project please see the Developers Manual

Here is some example features that we have identified from the feedback we got:

• Easy and safe ON/OFF (unplug power, and safely shutdown Pi. Plug power and screen should display the browser, connected and displaying the home page)
• Display specific internet site(s) (either taken with scripts to a local offline version, or directly online with a script not allowing users to jump to other external links and a UI to return user to the donation box site)
• Donation Cloud (a service to allow connectivity of multiple boxes, running the same projects)
• Donation Cloud front end (a service allowing project managers, adding, editing, monitoring their crowdfunding projects)
• ...

Users

We have also written an easy to follow user manual for anyone who mind find it useful here

Troubleshooting

Coming soon...

External Links

• Github