Greetings and thank you
Posted: Sun Oct 11, 2026 8:28 pm
Hi,
I am Malcolm - from England.
Thank you in advance to everyone involved in this project and this forum.
As there is a separate topic for details of my board, I will post that information in that topic shortly.
I am really interested in Openstick for two reasons:
1) I think that it is a really "neat" (clever and innovative) project. I have played around with Raspberry Pi and Arduino on other projects. The idea of an affordable single board computer with LTE capability really appeals to me for many reasons.
2) I may have a really useful application for a fleet of opensticks as follows:
I volunteer for a charity called a Talking Newspaper. This provides a local news service to blind people in our area. Volunteers are recorded reading articles from local newspapers. The newspapers are published once per week on Thursdays. These volunteers - called "Readers" record on Fridays or Saturdays - depending on individual volunteer availability. Recordings are digital files (can be wav, mp3 or whatever iOs produces (aac?))
My role is as an "Engineer". Engineers provide sound engineering to the readings (standardising the format to mp3, editing out unwanted aspects of the recording, levelling the volume between recordings and then placing all the readings onto USB sticks. For our locality, that is 50 sticks (+/- listener churn).
I deliver the sticks to a third category of volunteer - "Admin". Admins perform the necessary functions to enable the USB sticks to be sent via snail mail - managing address lists, putting the USB sticks in envelopes, then taking the sticks to the local postal sorting office. Admins also receive USB sticks when they are returned.
When the listeners receive the USB sticks they can play them in MP3/bluetooth players that the charity provides and are adapted to be easy for blind people to use.
The postal service (called Royal Mail but no longer owned by "The Crown" - i.e. UK Government) should deliver the envelopes for free and used to do so pretty well until privatisation/COVID/sale to an overseas billionaire/etc. However, the service is now so bad that sometimes USB sticks do not reach the listeners until the next publication date.
There is much debate about services such as Alexa and our publications are distributed online via website and special player. We do not use Alexa for several reasons. The most significant is that most of our listeners do not like Alexa and out management takes the view that customers are right and have privacy rights, etc.
Also, an investment of 50+ specialist players is significant for a small charity. Continuing to use those devices meets several objectives of the charity.
So, I would like to develop a system that replaces the USB sticks that we currently use with a system where we can plug a device into any one of our existing MP3 players and then send the recordings direct to the USB sticks without using the Royal Mail. Discovering OpenStick has made me believe that such a solution might be possible.
I am Malcolm - from England.
Thank you in advance to everyone involved in this project and this forum.
As there is a separate topic for details of my board, I will post that information in that topic shortly.
I am really interested in Openstick for two reasons:
1) I think that it is a really "neat" (clever and innovative) project. I have played around with Raspberry Pi and Arduino on other projects. The idea of an affordable single board computer with LTE capability really appeals to me for many reasons.
2) I may have a really useful application for a fleet of opensticks as follows:
I volunteer for a charity called a Talking Newspaper. This provides a local news service to blind people in our area. Volunteers are recorded reading articles from local newspapers. The newspapers are published once per week on Thursdays. These volunteers - called "Readers" record on Fridays or Saturdays - depending on individual volunteer availability. Recordings are digital files (can be wav, mp3 or whatever iOs produces (aac?))
My role is as an "Engineer". Engineers provide sound engineering to the readings (standardising the format to mp3, editing out unwanted aspects of the recording, levelling the volume between recordings and then placing all the readings onto USB sticks. For our locality, that is 50 sticks (+/- listener churn).
I deliver the sticks to a third category of volunteer - "Admin". Admins perform the necessary functions to enable the USB sticks to be sent via snail mail - managing address lists, putting the USB sticks in envelopes, then taking the sticks to the local postal sorting office. Admins also receive USB sticks when they are returned.
When the listeners receive the USB sticks they can play them in MP3/bluetooth players that the charity provides and are adapted to be easy for blind people to use.
The postal service (called Royal Mail but no longer owned by "The Crown" - i.e. UK Government) should deliver the envelopes for free and used to do so pretty well until privatisation/COVID/sale to an overseas billionaire/etc. However, the service is now so bad that sometimes USB sticks do not reach the listeners until the next publication date.
There is much debate about services such as Alexa and our publications are distributed online via website and special player. We do not use Alexa for several reasons. The most significant is that most of our listeners do not like Alexa and out management takes the view that customers are right and have privacy rights, etc.
Also, an investment of 50+ specialist players is significant for a small charity. Continuing to use those devices meets several objectives of the charity.
So, I would like to develop a system that replaces the USB sticks that we currently use with a system where we can plug a device into any one of our existing MP3 players and then send the recordings direct to the USB sticks without using the Royal Mail. Discovering OpenStick has made me believe that such a solution might be possible.