Create a Retro Gaming Handheld with a Raspberry Pi Zero and the Retroflag GPi Case

I’m a huge Raspberry Pi advocate and own more of them than any single person should own. They are cheap, moderately powerful, and are useful for quite a few circumstances.

In a previous tutorial titled, Emulate Classic Video Games On A Raspberry Pi Zero With RetroPie, I demonstrated how to repurpose an old Raspberry Pi Zero to be a gaming console about the size of an Amazon Fire Stick. For $5.00 to $10.00, these devices make retro gaming possible with little setup involved.

Recently, my buddy Mark Smith told me about the Retroflag GPi case, a case with a screen, speaker, and all the expectations of a handheld. This thing looks just like a classic Nintendo Gameboy, but has better hardware and is powered by a Raspberry Pi Zero. It is incredibly awesome.

In this tutorial, we’re going to go a step further. We’re going to take a Raspberry Pi Zero and combine it with a Retroflag GPi case to make a portable retro gaming powerhouse.

Block Ads at a Network Level with Pi-Hole and an Ubiquiti EdgeRouter

Advertisements are incredibly annoying, and I’m saying this as someone who relies on them for income on The Polyglot Developer. Even with ad providers such as Google saying that they’re working to provide a better experience, things seem to be getting worse. You could use tools like Adblock Plus in the browser, but what about mobile devices? Better yet, what about all the websites out there that detect when an ad blocker is being used and make the browsing experience even worse by denying access?

To get beyond these advertisement related problems, you’re going to need to handle things from a network level, not a per device level.

In this tutorial we’re going to see how to configure Pi-Hole, a popular network level ad blocking solution. For this example we’re going to use it with a Raspberry Pi and an Ubiquiti EdgeRouter, even though other networking hardware can be substituted.

Share Internet Between macOS and a Raspberry Pi Zero Over USB

If you’re a fan of the Raspberry Pi, you might have stumbled upon my tutorial for interacting with a Raspberry Pi Zero using nothing more than a USB cable. If you recall, the standard Raspberry Pi Zero has no WiFi, no Bluetooth, and no Ethernet.

Alright, so let’s assume that you’re able to interact with your Raspberry Pi Zero. Now what? How do you update it, download new software, or work on some awesome projects that might require internet in some fashion?

Well, you could take a look at my tutorial titled, Three Simple Ways to get Online with a Raspberry Pi Zero IoT Device, or you could share the internet of your host computer without having to purchase any extra hardware.

In this tutorial we’re going to see how to share the internet from our host device, assuming that host is macOS.

Continuous Integration With GitLab CI And Docker Using A Raspberry Pi

I know I’ve mentioned this before, but I’ve recently started to get serious about my content production and deployment approach on The Polyglot Developer. My goal is to be able to write my tutorials in Markdown, push to GitLab, and have it automatically deployed as a Docker container on my production server. Being able to automate things and take advantage of Docker will definitely improve my productivity in the long term.

So I’ve been playing around with tools on the subject, more specifically GitLab, because that is what I’m using to save a history of the blog. GitLab is a source code repository, but also a whole lot more given its ability to do continuous integration, continuous deployment, and work with Docker directly.

We’re going to take a look at installing GitLab and Docker on a Raspberry Pi, then configuring a GitLab CI Runner to take control of our continuous integration process every time we push some code. While it might sound easy, there are some certain things that aren’t so obvious in the setup and configuration.

Peer-To-Peer Storage With A Raspberry Pi And Resilio Sync

I’ve been slowly trying to cut down on my online file storage footprint by switching to software and tools that I’m in full control over. For example, I was once a very heavy user of Dropbox and similar tools when it came to transferring files around between my computers, but that could leave my files exposed in the cloud, not to mention it was slow due to the time it took to communicate with the remote server.

This is where Resilio Sync comes into play. Once called, BitTorrent Sync, this software allows you to transfer files between devices on your network, without a middleman, in a peer-to-peer (P2P) fashion, like you would find with the popular BitTorrent protocol. The more devices, the faster the synchronization.

We’re going to see how to install and configure Resilio Sync on a Raspberry Pi to act as a synchronization node on your network for file storage and fast transfers.

Emulate Classic Video Games On A Raspberry Pi Zero With RetroPie

Are you into video games, because I certainly am. Did you grow up playing the classics on your Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and Nintendo 64? I did, and I still can’t get enough of them. If you’re like me and love video games and want to go back to simpler times, you can actually build your own entertainment station that contains a mashup of all the best consoles.

We’re going to see how to use an incredibly affordable Raspberry Pi Zero W to create an entertainment system the size of a pack of gum that can emulate all the classics using a custom flavor of Linux called RetroPie.

Crack Wireless Passwords Using A Raspberry Pi And Aircrack

Another day and another project with one of the many Raspberry Pi devices that are laying around my house. One of my younger family members came over to try to get inspired for his college future so we decided to work on a project together. We wanted to explore some cybersecurity topics rather than programming which led us to network security.

We decided to try to obtain the password to my wireless network password using the popular Aircrack-ng software. While it didn’t find my password in the end, it doesn’t mean we weren’t successful.

In this tutorial, we’re going to see how to setup Aircrack-ng on a Raspberry Pi to decipher WiFi passwords for WEP and WPA secured networks.