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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 17th, 2023

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  • It may have started with the ability to replicate signatures, but even during the internet age, fax does have one interesting advantage.

    It uses a dedicated circuit to communicate rather than using packets.

    By that I mean that two fax machines that are connected to send a fax are electronically linked together in a dedicated circuit for the duration of the session, and all the data takes the same path.

    This is in stark contrast to an email, which is split up into packets which may take quite different paths to reach the other destination.











  • A Pi is obviously overkill, even a Pi Z w which we ended up using, but they are efficient enough for us, and more importantly, I know the system, and I could relatively quickly get it working using just bash on the Pi.

    I was not really interested in learning how to program on a different system just for this.

    We did some power analytics on the Pi and disabled a few things, sorry I don’t remember it right now.

    The unit is placed in a semi public place where teenagers sometimes congregate and we don’t want to draw any attention to the device, so solar power is out.

    A LoRa unit though could be interesting to implement, sadly my parents house is up a steap hill and there is no line of sight.

    I have been thinking of experimenting with Meshtastic and LoRa for off grid coms due to the geopolitical situation here in Europe, might be worth it getting a few units to test out.