I haven’t played with Raspberry Pi quite enough. I’ll do a write up on my garage door opener project at another time. But a really promising place for the Pi in my opinion is the role of a traveling router/access point. I don’t find the process of connecting to the WiFi in a hotel room particularly hard. It’s connecting back into my own network to access my my services that is difficult. The methods that I have at my disposal are:
- IPSec VPN
- SSH/SCP to selected service
- Direct access where things are configured for it
Running OpenBSD on a Raspberry Pi gives me a solid place to put an IPSec connection for the whole hotel room network. Getting there involves installing OpenBSD on the Pi in the first place
Ingredients:
- A Raspberry Pi 3B or 3B+ each model has plusses and minusses
- An OpenBSD Raspberry pi snapshot release available at this url.
- OpenBSD does not support the Pi video yet. The install console is serial. You need an Arduino/Raspberry Pi serial cable. The link points to a 4pin style. It connects as follows:
- Black <-> Pi GND
- White <-> Pi TX0
- Green <-> Pi RX0
- A fast USB stick. OpenBSD can’t run from MicroSD card yet. This one works.
- A WiFi adapter that you can live with this is going to be a compromise because WiFi has somewhat left the BSDs behind. These two CanaKit Wifi, and TP-Link WiFi, work.