Wifi - creating a share box

One of the things I am finding this year is what projects will interest students. I am trying to find some projects that will get students using the raspberry pi. These are essential in developing students understanding of hardware/software. A simple computer that has the power to do so much. I came across an idea a couple of months ago where a student was creating small radio stations so he could get share information through his community.

I think I stumbled across this one through the raspberry pi website, connecting people in remote areas, and this has me thinking. Living where I am we have a possibly of a natural disaster. We need a small powered device that can connect people. Using the ideas found in www.raspberrypi.org.nz/archives/tag/piratebox has lead us to develop a shared file storage and messaging system. It uses a USB drive to provide the storage. Although it is a bit primative. We are looking at how to get the raspberry pi to interface with this to provide a better web environment through mysql/php/apache2 to allow faster web browsing.

At the moment there is a box sitting in my room, doing very little, it is more around the idea of being a repository for students to access material on there devices, as any wifi enabled device can connect to it.

Sitting plugged in my classroom.

The information I gleened form http://wiki.daviddarts.com/PirateBox_DIY, a pretty good tutorial, also using information form http://daviddarts.com/piratebox-diy-openwrt/?title=PirateBox_DIY_OpenWrt the wifi box I obtained from pricespy.co.nz http://pricespy.co.nz/product.php?p=1034742 it is a 

TP-Link TL-MR3020 which provides IEEE 802.11n, IEEE 802.11g, IEEE 802.11b, so it allows for almost any device to connect. the USB stick is a 2Gig ADATA, though I may replace it with a faster and bigger USB drive at some point.

Its rather interesting, I watched with some interest as the students found the box on their wifi, questions of who's is it, do you know its there came around. The part I found distributing is that the made themselves be other members of the class and posted rather poor taste messages. This is concerning.