Ezra Harris

Category: Uncategorized

  • 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:

  • Motion Eye OS – Raspberry Pi Project

    Recently for Christmas, I had received three Raspberry Pi zero’s. Since then, I had not done anything with them. Until yesterday, when I found out about a camera OS for Raspberry Pi, called ‘Motion Eye OS,’ I looked up some tutorials and got started installing it. First, I prepared an SD Card, formatted it, and installed the downloaded OS from GitHub (Link Here), using Balena Etcher. Then I plugged the SD card into my Raspberry Pi Zero. At first, it didn’t show anything on the screen, so I unplugged it. I did some research and found that sometimes you need to reinstall the OS on the sd card for it to work, so I did that and started the raspberry pi again; finally, it showed something, but unfortunately, it only showed what’s known as a “rainbow screen” (picture below), and so I did some more researching and found that I had accidentally skipped a step in the on the setup page, which was configuring the “wpa_supplicant” file, the wpa_supplicant file is a file for telling what wifi network to connect to, so I edited the file using Notepad++, (Note: don’t edit the file using Ubuntu, I had to use a windows computer for editing the file). After that, I ejected the sd card from the computer and plugged it into the Raspberry Pi again. Finally, it booted to the correct screen, and after a bit of waiting, it loaded Motion Eye OS correctly. Then on a different device, I opened my router control panel (to find your control panel, type in 192.168.1.1. If that does not work, read this). And located the device on my “connected devices’ panel. Typically, it will be called something like this: “meye-6e7ea0fd”, then I copied and pasted the given IP address of the raspberry pi into my web browser. And it opened the control panel for the Raspberry Pi, and now I can view my camera from anywhere around the house! I plan on 3D printing a camera mount in the future.

  • Setting up Ethernet

    I have heard from most computer professionals that ethernet is much better than using wifi for home computers because of the speed compared to wifi speeds. Today, I installed an Ethernet switch underneath my desk. First, I ordered an Ethernet switch from amazon (Amazon Link), and then I also ordered a 15 foot long cat7 Ethernet cable (Amazon Link). Once they arrived, a few days later, I plugged an ethernet cable into the nearby ethernet outlet, then sent an internet signal to another port that I plugged into the port that I labeled “North Room” (which was my bedroom). Then I plugged my Ethernet cable I just ordered into there and then plugged the other end into the switch, which I mounted right below my desk. So far, it seems to work better than Wi-Fi. I wanted available Ethernet ports because I have several Raspberry Pi’s that I use for different projects that need to be connected directly using ethernet instead of wifi is because I had issues with my Raspberry Pi. Either the wifi chip inside the Raspberry Pi isn’t strong enough, or it doesn’t have wifi compatibility built-in. 

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