About Carpentries Offline

(Previously known as CarpenPi)

Carpentries Offline aims to facilitate Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry lessons to be taught from a cluster of Raspberry Pis, to allow them to be run in places with unreliable Internet connections.

Carpentries Offline was born out of the Software Sustainability Institute's 2021 Collababorations Workshop. The idea was formed by a team during the Collaborative Ideas session, and the implementation began on the Hack Day. For more info on the project motivation see the CollabW21-Demo-Presentation repository.

Minimum Requirements

All Raspberry Pi's need Wifi capability which is built into version 3 and 4 Pi's but USB dongles can be included for lower versions. At least two Pi's are required for infrastructure and then enough Pi's for all attendees.

Code of Conduct

We follow the Code of Conduct outlined by the Carpentries

Architecture

See Pi-Network for an overview.

Repositories

Raspberry Pi images/setup

  • AccessPoint: runs an access point on a Pi to set up a local network
  • WebServer: runs a web server on a Pi to host the carpentries training materials without internet access
  • git-server: runs a git server on a Pi to allow course participants to collaborate via git without needing external internet access

Other repositories

License

Following the carpentries website we are using the MIT licence for code and CC-BY for materials.

Future Work

See project issues for details for future work. The main areas are:

  • Making the pi network auto-configurable
  • Updating the training materials
  • The workshop admin area

Contributors

In alphabetical order: