December 24 – After six months in development, we are finally delivering our customised, repurposed slim clients to Ukraine. We are incredibly proud of these devices, which represent a breakthrough for us as a reuse organisation.
Thin clients have no hard drive and are generally considered redundant once they are out of warranty; their highly specialised nature means they are tricky to repurpose. The NHS and other large organisations dispose of thousands of these devices.
True to our values, we couldn’t just accept that they can’t have a useful second life, so we took them on. Discovering that they have 20GB of memory on the motherboard, our volunteer Andrew Stroeva installed and customised Lubuntu, effectively turning the redundant thin clients into new mini super computers custom-built for education.
We are now shipping 5000 of these for Ukrainian schools, as they have passed quality control. They are very fast, they connect to the internet and are installed with a full suite of office applications. There is even some space left to store documents!
This is one of the most significant things we have done as a reuse organisation. It demonstrates what can be achieved where there is the will to extend the life of technology considered redundant.