Seneca Freedom Toaster
The Seneca Freedom Toaster is a kiosk we built that will let students, staff and visitors to Seneca College burn a CD or DVD with open source software free of charge.It is currently located at the Seneca@York campus, at the entrance to the library and computing commons in the SEQ building.
We hope the selection of software available is the best and most useful of open source for Seneca students (e.g. OpenSuSE, Ubuntu, The Open CD).
The Team
The Freedom Toaster success was a result of cooperation between students, teachers, administration, research and innovation, IT, marketing, and finance from Seneca College.| Name | Role / Department | Contribution |
| Hassan Assiri | Manager / Academic Computer Systems | Donated the PC, helped purchase the touchscreen and the burner |
| Tom Bartsiokas | Marketing and Communications | Wrote an article about the toaster, published in the school paper |
| Kubilay Dagdelen | CNS Student / Computer Studies | Helped with the painting |
| David Humphrey | Professor / Computer Studies | Promotion |
| Vienna Ly | Graphic Designer | Designed the artwork |
| Tiago Moreira | BSD Student / Computer Studies | Lots of work on all the hardware matters |
| Dominic Noronha | Manager / Budgets & Financial Planning | Technical advice that set us onto the right track more than once |
| Kevin Pitts | eLearning Faculty Advisor | Found a student (working part-time for him) to design the artwork. |
| John Selmys | Professor, Linux Club coordinator / Computer Studies | Every part of the project from start to finish |
| Andrew Smith | BSD Student / Computer Studies | Project coordinator, software, website, a bit of everything |
| Chris Tyler | Professor / Computer Studies | Technical advice that set us onto the right track more than once |
| Evan Weaver | Chair / Computer Studies | Donated the cabinet. |
| The cdot project | Centre for Development of Open Technology / Seneca College | Subversion repository and space on the web server |
| The ibox committee | Idea Box / Seneca College | Most funding for the toaster |
Building the Toaster - Illustrated
This page has a mostly complete account of how we built the toaster. Lots of pictures.Building the Toaster - Parts and Tools
An incomplete list of Parts and Tools we used for building the toaster.Software
Our subversion repository allows anonymous readonly access, use this command to download it: svn co svn://littlesvr.ca/prog/toaster/srcFor obvious reasons the ISO images aren't in there. To figure out how to get the software running read README.TXT and isolist/README.TXT
If you have questions, contact Andrew. The address is at the bottom of the page.
Artwork
The artwork is also available from subversion. It's in Adobe Illustrator CS2 format. Use this command to download it: svn co svn://littlesvr.ca/prog/toaster/artwork/vienna/PrintFiles_toaster/It is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
The proposal
The proposal is how the ball got rolling. Notice that it has information relevant to the project sponsor (ibox in this case), and not any of the ideology I subscribe to.I put it here as inspiration for you, maybe it will help you build one in your school.
Press
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The Senecan (school paper) has an article about the toaster in the March 2007 issue. A pdf is also available.
Linux Reality did an interview with me where I talked about the project. Also available here.
Other toasters
The idea came from the Freedom Toaster projects in South Africa. They have a website here. Among other things there is a full list of toasters in Africa.You can use this form to send me email with questions or whatever.