Ezra Harris

Author: ezradharris

  • HorseShoe (private)

  • Octoprint (Pt 1) Wifi Problems – Raspberry Pi Project

    A while back, I did a blog post on installing Octoprint for the first time. Since then, I had mostly not done much with it until recently when I heard that you could use a Raspberry Pi touchscreen and connect it to the raspberry pi and by using a plugin, you can create a small touchscreen panel which you can use to monitor the temp, time left, etc. I did some digging around my drawers and found two TFT LCD screens that my brother Nicholas repurchased a while. So I formatted an SD card and downloaded the image from the site. After flashing, I had to open the WPA_Supplicant file which is a wifi config and setup file. After I was done I loaded the SD card onto the Raspberry Pi, but I ran into some issues, the Raspberry Pi wouldn’t connect to my wifi. After a lot of looking at Octoprint forums, I tried several different things including reinstalling the OS and downloading it again. But none of it worked, one thing I saw on a furom was maybe that the router had a setting enabled which made it so the Raspberry Pi couldn’t connect. So I plugged in our second older router, and after running through the config and setup it was ready, I edited the WPA_Supplicant file to connect to the other router instead of the main one and then plugged in the raspberry Pi and surprisingly it connected! So at the moment of me writing i am figuring out how to use a TFT touchscreen with Octoprint and I will make a follow up post when I’m finished.

  • Pi-hole – Raspberry Pi Project

    Awhile back, I heard about a raspberry pi project called Pi-hole, which is basically a network-wide adblocker. The way it works is that when a page like an example speedtest.net has a lot of ads on its main page. Which speedtest.net asks the ad provider for the content to display, but what Pi-Hole does is it intercepts that and gives the page a blank answer then which the page will not show anything in the place of the ad, this, unfortunately, does not work on every ad, for example. Youtube ads, but it can block most webpage ads, and of course, you can whitelist or blacklist ad providers on the Pi-Hole admin page. I did have some issues figuring out how to setup Pi-Hole, so it will block ads on my main computer, but after a bit of googling around, I figured out how to change the DNS settings on my Linux computer. If you would want to do the same project and set it up here is a great tutorial I followed for installation. After I configured the DNS settings on my devices gave it a try, and these are the before and after pictures on speedtest.net:

    Before:

    After:

  • Retro-Pi – Raspberry Pi Project

    Recently I heard about an OS called Retro-Pi, which is an OS for playing retro games. At first, I thought that it would come pre-installed with some games like PacMan, discovered, unfortunately, it does not come with pre-installed games. But you can download ROM files online and upload them to the SD card, which the raspberry pi will detect, and you can play the game. One of the things which intrigued me was the fact that it had controller support. I recently purchased an Xbox 360 controller receiver, which makes it so you can play with a controller on most devices. I was a bit skeptical about controller support, because before when I had tried to use it on other devices that claimed to have controller support, I had to go through some loopholes to get it partly working. So I used the Raspberry Pi official etcher and started etching. After a bit of waiting, Once finished, I inserted the SD card into the raspberry pi and booted the Pi. It had detected what type of controller I was using and started running through the calibration and setup. After I had completed the controller’s setup, it opened the game emulator, which had several empty folders. I can’t wait to install some games and try them out. This project was done on a Raspberry Pi 400. Tutorial of setup Here

    Here are some pictures of the Retro-Pi main home page:

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