Hasta La Gadget!

As the recent NSA leaks have proven, a lot – if not all – of what you do, say and store online can be examined and archived by other people and organizations without your knowledge or approval. That’s why Adafruit Industries put together a DIY kit for those looking to add an extra layer of anonymity and security to their online activities. It’s called the Onion Pi, a plug and play device that creates an anonymous access point.

As you may have guessed, the device is based on the popular Raspberry Pi computer. When you connect it to the Internet via an Ethernet cable, it creates a Wi-Fi access point that is connected to the Tor network. In simple terms, the Tor network encrypts your connection and routes it through a random series of relays. This makes it harder – but not necessarily impossible – to identify your location as well as the data that you’re sending or receiving. You can listen to the folks at Adafruit talk about the Onion Pi at around 11:50 in the video below:

Stage a PRISM break and order the Onion Pi kit from Adafruit Industries. The kit with a small antenna is available for $90 (USD); there’s a kit that comes with a large antenna but it’s out of stock at the moment. Adafruit donates part of the proceeds from the sale of the Onion Pi to the Tor Foundation. Sadly the Onion Pi logo is not included in the kit.

[via OhGizmo!]

DIY micro-robotics is having a moment. The latest project to take the crowdfunding route — via Kickstarter — to build out a platform for playing around with robotics is called BrickPi. As its name suggests, BrickPi is a mash-up of the Raspberry Pi microcomputer, co-opted to act as the brains of the robot, plus LEGO Mindstorms sensors, bricks and motors for crafting its working parts. Firmware is written in Arduino, making it open and hackable. Indeed, the BrickPi makers have put their hardware designs and software source code online for download on Github.

The BrickPi extends the Raspberry Pi with a board that snaps in place over the Pi to connect it to the various LEGO sensors (such as touch sensors, colour sensors and gyroscope). This is then contained within a plastic case that is compatible with LEGO bricks so it can act as the base for building out the robot. An on board battery connector allows the robot to be untethered from a power socket so it can go roving.

The BrickPi is the brainchild of educational robotics company  Dexter Industries which also sells sensors for LEGO Mindstorms. The Kickstarter campaign has five days left to run and is approaching $90,000 in pledged backing from more than 1,270 backers — hugely above the original (modest) goal of $1,889.

Going the crowdfunding route sounds like it was primarily about building a community and getting the word out for Brick Pi’s makers but they have added a series of stretch funding goals to explain what they plan to do with the extra money raised. These include adding more sensors and ports to the device and creating additional libraries (in C/C++, as well as the original Python libraries) to expand programming options.

“We have a lot of plans for the extra funds raised and they all include improving the user experience and opening up the BrickPi to a wider audience,” says Dexter Industries’ John Cole. ” That mostly means putting together some sharp tutorials, and putting together more examples.  In my humble experience, where a lot of technical projects like this go wrong is when they have only 2 or 3 example projects.  Adults can think of a lot of projects and interesting ways to use the product, but kids have trouble with it, get bored, and move on.”

The original goal of the funding campaign was to bring the cost of the BrickPi down to $35 — making it the same price as the Raspberry Pi. BrickPi also pledged to write a library for the Scratch programming language, itself developed for helping kids to learn how to code. With projects like this, and mOwayduino — another robotics platform in the making due to go the crowdfunding route shortly — hardware hacking for creatively minded kids has never looked so easy.

Ben Heck has created a handheld game console with the Raspberry Pi running at its core.

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The Raspberry Pi has seen a lot of different uses, and it’s one of the most popular DIY toys for electronic hobbyists. In a Reddit thread where users post about all of their different uses for the credit card-sized circuit board, one user in particular has an interesting use: circumventing China’s internet firewall to get censor-less WiFi.

Essentially, he connects his Raspberry Pi board to a WiFi dongle and connects that to his own VPN server running OpenVPN. Once he plugs the Raspberry Pi module into ethernet and into a USB port, he instantly has censor-free WiFi internet access. And the best part is, he doesn’t need to configure anything on his devices, as built-in VPN offerings on iOS and Android are quite poor.

Of course, though, VPNs are common in China, as they give users access to blocked websites in the country, but if you’re not at home, you always need to install and open a VPN client eveytime you use a new device, which isn’t a huge problem, but it’s inconvenient. This Redditor, however, made things quite simple.

However, he says that connecting to his VPN server that’s located in France takes a while, but once it’s up and running, it can remain stable for a long time, getting speeds up to 4Mbps, although he says it’s generally a lot slower than that most of the time, but we wouldn’t be complaining if that meant we could access blocked websites.

The Redditor says that it’s a “fight against censorship everyday,” and the government is always finding new ways to crack down on VPNs, including shutting down UDP connections and throttling TCP connections. Plus, he says that China purposely slows down websites that use any kind of Google product such as Adwords or Analytics.

VIA: The Register

SOURCE: Reddit

Raspberry Pi used to circumvent China’s internet firewall is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
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The $35/$25 Raspberry Pi microcomputer is being used by hardware hackers to power all sorts of creative projects. Including, in the above instance, a Raspberry Pi powered laptop, created by developer Eric Chou — principally by tying in the Motorola Atrix laptop dock. Which surely must be the coolest use of that piece of kit to date.

The smartphone that the dock was intended to be hooked up to has since been discontinued but as Adafruit Industries points out in the below ‘how to’ video, the laptop dock can still be picked up via various online outlets. Its Micro USB and Micro HDMI jacks offer a neat, relatively straightfoward way to turn a Pi into a laptop. Adafruit’s video shows which connectors to get and how to splice them together to plug in the Pi and get the DIY laptop working.

Chou, meanwhile, has costed out his version of the Pi laptop hack — including an optional Airlink WiFi module. In total the components costs around $125, plus the cost of the Pi — making it cheaper overall than the build costs of the XO ‘One laptop per child’ laptop (the XO apparently costs around $200 to make). It’s also a lot more accessible to individuals and small groups, being as the latter machine has to be ordered by the thousand so is generally restricted to government-backed mass education projects. Go the Pi-powered DIY route and so long as you’re willing to roll up your sleeves and do a little hacking, much smaller batches of low cost laptops can be put together and put to work where they’re really needed.

The Raspberry Pi’s potential as a low cost computing platform for developing countries is pretty exciting. Pis are already being used to power a school computing lab in rural Cameroon, thanks to a Belgian volunteer project which involved a suitcase full of the microcomputers being taken out to Africa and set up with monitors and keyboards acquired locally. It’s a great fixed-location learning solution, but couple in a bit of kit like the Atrix dock and portability could really extend the usefulness of the device.

A Pi-powered laptop wouldn’t need to be tethered to a classroom location, but could be taken home by kids so they can carry on learning (the dock also contains a battery so even without any electricity at home it would offer some hours of use). The not-for-profit Raspberry Pi Foundation, which created the Pi with the hope of getting more U.K. kids learning to code, has said it is keen to look for ways to get more Pis out to developing countries this year, where the need for a low cost computing solution is even greater.