Mastodawn

smells of bikes 1d ago

I finally published my new project, the Banned Book Library! Think of it as a #Cyberpunk dead drop. Reprogram an #esp32 WiFi light bulb to host a web server with books banned in your community. Screw them in wherever is convenient :D. You can't stop the signal!

https://www.richardosgood.com/posts/banned-book-library/

This was partially inspired after reading @benbrown short story "Library" a while back.

https://benbrown.com/library/

Banned Book Library

OverviewA long while back I had an idea to hack a WiFi smart light bulb to do something more useful to me. Actually, I had a few different ideas of things to do with them. One of these ideas was to mo…

Banned Book Library

bentendo 1d ago

@rickoooooo wow this is awesome!

@benbrown thank you! After playing with the esp32 for this project I'm considering picking up one of those esp32 watches i saw you were tinkering with. I've been aware of Esp32 for a long time but now that I've actually used one myself I've got a lot of ideas brewing.

bentendo 1d ago

@rickoooooo it has been fun! i also have a lilygo esp32 pager, and an esp32 based eink reader ... all hackable!

@benbrown @rickoooooo Have you looked at the Shelly light switches and power monitors? They have ESP32, they hide in a junction box, and the manufacturer doesn't discourage replacing the firmware.

@kbob @benbrown no but I will check them out! Sounds like an interesting platform to hack on. Might be harder to install one guerrilla style though

JackGangi 1d ago

@rickoooooo @benbrown

The 500 Hats of LambdaCalculus 1d ago

@rickoooooo @benbrown This is the way! You've built a Projekt B00KM4RK!

@lambdacalculus @benbrown That's cool, I hadn't heard of Projekt B00KM4RK before. It's a very similar idea.

I liked the idea of repurposing a light bulb because it is self powered (as long as the light switch is on) and it blends in and doesn't look like anything out of the ordinary. No need for batteries or solar panels, etc. Also very accessible because you can buy one off the shelf and flash it OTA so you don't need any special tools.

The 500 Hats of LambdaCalculus 1d ago

@rickoooooo @benbrown Get the summer 2025 issue of 2600 for info on it! But the long and short is it's also an ESP32 based device with a tiny web portal for sharing books and materials, either as a dead drop or as a portable server (which means it's also a Pirate Box!)

@lambdacalculus @benbrown

I found some info on ProjektBookmark here
https://slugnoodle.com/zine.php?article=reclaiming-the-shadows

and here
https://github.com/TheSlugNoodle/ProjectBookmark

Reclaiming The Shadows | slugnoodle.com

The 500 Hats of LambdaCalculus 1d ago

@rickoooooo @benbrown That's our homie, @TheSlugNoodle! He's the man who inspired us all!

Chalk Outline Hieroglyph 1d ago

@lambdacalculus @rickoooooo @benbrown @TheSlugNoodle

I hope you are happy with yourselves... I have a new project now.

(you should be happy with yourselves)

bentendo 1d ago

@rickoooooo @lambdacalculus I talked about mine here: https://benbrown.com/txt/read/2026-05-11

I never did properly document or release any of the code :p

ESP32 Life

I first learned about the ESP32 chip from my friend Wrew when he initially posted about porting the B00km4rk project . Three important things clicked: a cool project I wanted to be involved with, a f…

benbrown.txt

@benbrown @lambdacalculus I hadn't seen that you'd built something like this already too! Makes sense though as Library partially inspired the idea for me to begin with.

Chalk Outline Hieroglyph 1d ago

@rickoooooo @benbrown

That is SO damn cool.

JacobCoffin 1d ago

@rickoooooo @benbrown this is an absolutely awesome writeup! I'm definitely adding this to my project pile!

Steve Lord 1d ago

@[email protected] @[email protected] this is amazing I can’t stop thinking about it thanks for making it

@rickoooooo @benbrown I like the Firefly Serenity reference.

Jo Hawkins 1d ago

@rickoooooo I wonder if you could get the mesh by using #meshcore or #meshtastic

@Djh1997 cool idea. You would have to add a LoRa radio to the circuit somehow, or else find a smart bulb that already has one.

Elias Thorne 1d ago

@rickoooooo @benbrown

oh that's good, that's really good.

@rickoooooo @benbrown That's a really neat project. I didn't even know ESP32 lightbulbs existed. I've seen ESP8266 ones, but some manufacturers have dropped even that as being too expensive/overkill for a lightbulb.

Antoinne Sterk 1d ago

@rickoooooo Very cool idea and wonderfully documented research blog 😀

Steven Hoefer 1d ago

@rickoooooo @benbrown Fahrenheit 451, hiding books in the light fixture.

DJ Southworth 1d ago

@rickoooooo @benbrown

I love everything about this.

synlogic4242 1d ago

@rickoooooo @benbrown cool! future feature ideas: able to run on battery or small (as possible) solar panel

David Carew 1d ago

@rickoooooo @benbrown I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to living in a world where lightbulbs can run webservers. But this is very cool!

oscarfalcon 1d ago

@rickoooooo @benbrown

Woah this is really freaking Cool!

Thomas Evans 1d ago

@rickoooooo @benbrown This is awesome!

@rickoooooo @benbrown What a great project! That glitch effect was way overengineered and absolutely worth it.

In the end, did you figure out how to flash the library onto the Iotorero bulb without opening it?

@kbob @benbrown I don't know enough web font end stuff to know how to do the glitch thing. I found that code online and modified it a bit.

And yes now that the firmware is complete you can just buy one of those bulbs with tasmota pre-installed and flash my firmware with WiFi. No disassembly required!

@rickoooooo @benbrown Sorry I'm completely fixated on a minor detail of your project, but I just wasted -- er, invested -- half the day in exploring the kind of glitch effects you can make with simple CSS tweaking. I stuck with rectangles, but the glitch regions can be arbitrary SVG paths.

David S 21h ago

@rickoooooo @benbrown

Moved reading this. I remember a couple of years ago a video on hackers who were making dead drop usb sticks in Germany by pasting them into walls in entrance ways to blocks of flats and this is a bit like that, albeit limit storage space.

Perhaps on your final idea of hunt the library, you could put the locations into geo:caching and gamify finding them?

Iris Young (he/they/she) (PhD)19h ago

@rickoooooo @benbrown this is not the future I anticipated but I'll gladly participate in this part.

Lockpick Extreme 18h ago

@rickoooooo @benbrown Thanks for documenting and sharing your work! This is awesome

Walrus 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿14h ago

@rickoooooo @benbrown

I'm extremely impressed by this, of course.

But I would be happy putting together little #RaspberryPi boxen that could do the same job almost effortlessly, and be hidden all over the place.

@Walrus @benbrown I think the larger the ecosystem of devices like this, the better! How would you keep the pi-based devices powered in the wild? One reason I liked the light bulb design is that it's plugged right into mains power without drawing attention. No batteries or sunlight required. Of course of someone turns the light off then you lose power, so it's a trade off.

Walrus 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿13h ago

@rickoooooo @benbrown

I think a box with a mains socket on the front, plugged into a mains socket, so it just looked like a socket that stuck out would do.

@Walrus @benbrown so it would have like a mains pass through so as to not block access to power. Disguised as like a thick mains receptacle? Sounds like a cool idea.

Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK 12h ago

@Walrus @rickoooooo @benbrown

ironically for those of us in UK (unless you have permission to put the device there) you'd risk far more bother for an offence of abstracting electricity than distributing banned books ( even Reform are only putting in a half-arsed attempt at restricting promotion of LGBT+ events).

These devices still remain a useful tactic as a "deniable asset" in a community space (so its harder for the space owners to get directly in trouble for the item being there)

love this. nice work. Would be amazing to also have it running reticulum.

@rickoooooo Really want to suggest this to a research group I am working with on as a solution to getting around ongoing censorship of left wing archives in SE Asia