The Raspberry Pi is all about
experimentation—so why not put together
your own project? Here are some things
we’d love to see; let us know if you’ve built a
distro, come up with a combination of packages,
or spotted something we’ve missed that can give
the Raspberry Pi these capabilities.›› A MUSIC MAKER
How about wiring up a series of arcade buttons
to the Pi—à la the Midi Fighter, or the MPC—
and using them to trigger samples? We’d need
superlow latency to use it as a live instrument,
knobs to tweak things as we play, and an easy
way to add samples—maybe pulling them from
whatever USB stick is plugged in.›› A CHROMECAST CLIENT
Yes, you could just buy a Chromecast for less,
but that’s not the point; a Pi that shows up on
your network as a Chromecast would be super-
useful, particularly if you could pair those
capabilities with local media playback, and keep
a file server running, too. A Chromecast is just a
Chromecast—a Pi is so much more.›› VIDEO VISUALIZER
You can already employ a HAT, such as the
ReSpeaker, to cook up your own Amazon Echo-
style smart assistant with the Raspberry Pi, but
how about using it for something a little more fun?
We want those twin mics to feed into a WinAmp-
style video visualizer to throw some serious
shapes on to a projector at a party—and, please,
throw in audio jukebox capabilities, too.›› STREAM DECK CLONE
The Stream Deck, from Corsair’s now-subsidiary
Elgato, is a cool but rather pricey tool for
streamers, which uses a grid of OLED buttons
to help you switch between scenes—we see no
reason why a Pi with a touchscreen couldn’t be
exploited in the same way.A customizable touchscreen
Stream Deck would be cool.©^
CO
RS
AIR
How tough is your network? The
Raspberry Pi 4’s compact size
makes it a strong candidate to run
as a discrete penetration tester.
nightly.builds.lakka.tv. Drill down
to the “RPi2.RPi4.arm” directory,
and grab the “img.gz” file, which
you can burn as usual using Etcher.
It’s bleeding edge so, like running
RetroPie on top of Raspbian, expect
a litany of bugs.
One more option: DOSBox. While
you’re hard pressed to translate
anything x86 on to the ARM
architecture of the Pi, DOSBox is
an exception. If you’re interested
in running classic old games, just
run sudo apt-get install dosbox to
download and install it.›› NETWORK TOOL A Pi with a
hardened network interface, faster
processor, and more generous
dollop of RAM makes it a powerful
candidate for running network
tools. PiHole, for example, is a
DNS sinkhole, a network-wide
ad blocker that pulls ads and
trackers out before they even have
chance to reach your devices. It’s
spectacularly simple to install (just
run curl -sSL https://install.pi-
hole.net | bash from your Raspbian
Buster shell), and requires only a
little router fiddling to get in order.
You need to make sure your router
points to your Pi as its primary
DNS server, rather than whatever
your ISP supplies, and give PiHolea static IP address, a task left as a
rather cruel challenge for you.
You could also use your Pi as
a network monitor. NEMS, the
Nagios Enterprise Monitoring
Server (http://nemslinux.com), is as
heavyweight as its name suggests.
It can watch all of your network
services and alert you if something
goes bad, offers a web interface
to show you the current network
status, and it supports plugins,
so you can extend its capabilities.
Ever y thing’s rolled into a neat distro
available to download and write
to a card, and as it can be a little
intensive on the Pi 4’s resources,
that single-use format suits it well.
How tough is your network?
The Pi’s compact size makes it
a strong candidate to run as a
discrete penetration tester, and Kali
Linux—Offensive Security’s tool-
packed pen-testing distro—was
one of the first to support the new
hardware. Download it from http://
offensive-security.com/kali-linux-
arm-images and write it to a card
as usual—but be careful, because
these are tools that really shouldn’t
be used on anything other than your
own hardware. If you take your
Raspberry Pi out of the house and
begin a reign of cyber terror, we
can’t be held responsible.How stressed is your Pi getting? Run htop on a command line to find out.maximumpc.com JAN 2020 MAXIMUMPC 43