Raspberry Pi 3 - the little computer that could
Back in 2012 the world was introduced to the Raspberry Pi - a $35 computer based on Broadcom System on a Chip (SOC) technology. It was originally produced for the education market to provide a cheap platform to allow kids to learn about computing.
Since that time it has become a standard for the "maker" community - those folks that turn Raspberry Pi boards into everything from Media Servers to routers to their desktop.
Raspberry Pi has become wildly successful with over 8M boards sold. While originally designed for some Debian Linux distros called Noobs and Raspbian with Python, you can now install Ubuntu Snappy or Mate as well as Google's Brillo and even Windows 10 IoT Core edition.
With a combination of USB, Wired and Wireless Networking, HDMI, GPIO and audio ports as well as SD card storage - you can turn utilize this little board to serve all sorts of roles.
One thing that the Raspberry Pi really demonstrates is the evolution in chip making and the SOC concept. While the Pi does have a separate VideoCore GPU it is a very capable device. The Pi 3's 1.2GHz 64-bit quad-core ARMv8 CPU and 1GB of RAM is more than powerful enough to run a wide array of projects.
So think about a Raspberry Pi as having a iPhone motherboard that you can connect traditional peripherals to. At 3.37" x 2.2" in size it can fit almost anywhere. It has no fan, pulls very little power and has no moving parts.
As I mentioned there are a number of use cases for Raspberry Pi and there is an entire community out there that provides insights, code and project details on how to make Pi do something.
In an earlier post I discussed whole home WiFi and discussed topology options like WDS and Mesh to support that.
One approach I didn't discuss in that post but is potentially viable is to use multiple Raspberry Pi devices as WiFi access points.
Doing a little due diligence I came across some interesting articles from folks who have already done this. While they used the earlier Raspberry Pi 2 device - which does not have built in WiFi capabilites -the concept is the same.
First the developer bought a cheap 802.11ac USB Wifi adapter - in his case Edimax EW-7711MAC - which supports the AC450 capability meaning up to 433Mbps over 5Ghz. That adapter @ Frys electronics is selling for $25.
Then after installing Raspbian OS installed two additional Linux projects:
1. hostapd - a Wifi access point service that supports all the WPA/IEEE 802.11i/EAP/IEEE 802.1X features
2. isc-dhcp-server - a dhcp server for providing IP address info.
Both of these projects are well documented and seem pretty straight forward.
Depending on your approach you could deploy a number of these configurations in your home and use the wired networking to collapse them back to a hub which could connect to your cable/dsl modem and with a little routing work - have a multiple access point network.
As I mentioned the Edimax Wifi adapter only supports AC450 speeds - but in many cases that may be more than enough to support a small number of connections and still provide plenty of bandwidth. And at $25 that means your access point would cost you $60.
But going even further - there are also projects out there for the two mesh approaches I discussed olsrd and open80211s that could potentially allow you to create the mesh topologies.
There are threads out there discussing these projects on Raspberry so it is entirely possible to create a meshed WiFi AP Network on Pi.
This is obviously not for the faint at heart and requires and understanding of Linux networking, daemons, etc. But it is certainly an interesting project.
Since that time it has become a standard for the "maker" community - those folks that turn Raspberry Pi boards into everything from Media Servers to routers to their desktop.
Raspberry Pi has become wildly successful with over 8M boards sold. While originally designed for some Debian Linux distros called Noobs and Raspbian with Python, you can now install Ubuntu Snappy or Mate as well as Google's Brillo and even Windows 10 IoT Core edition.
With a combination of USB, Wired and Wireless Networking, HDMI, GPIO and audio ports as well as SD card storage - you can turn utilize this little board to serve all sorts of roles.
One thing that the Raspberry Pi really demonstrates is the evolution in chip making and the SOC concept. While the Pi does have a separate VideoCore GPU it is a very capable device. The Pi 3's 1.2GHz 64-bit quad-core ARMv8 CPU and 1GB of RAM is more than powerful enough to run a wide array of projects.
So think about a Raspberry Pi as having a iPhone motherboard that you can connect traditional peripherals to. At 3.37" x 2.2" in size it can fit almost anywhere. It has no fan, pulls very little power and has no moving parts.
As I mentioned there are a number of use cases for Raspberry Pi and there is an entire community out there that provides insights, code and project details on how to make Pi do something.
In an earlier post I discussed whole home WiFi and discussed topology options like WDS and Mesh to support that.
One approach I didn't discuss in that post but is potentially viable is to use multiple Raspberry Pi devices as WiFi access points.
Doing a little due diligence I came across some interesting articles from folks who have already done this. While they used the earlier Raspberry Pi 2 device - which does not have built in WiFi capabilites -the concept is the same.
First the developer bought a cheap 802.11ac USB Wifi adapter - in his case Edimax EW-7711MAC - which supports the AC450 capability meaning up to 433Mbps over 5Ghz. That adapter @ Frys electronics is selling for $25.
Then after installing Raspbian OS installed two additional Linux projects:
1. hostapd - a Wifi access point service that supports all the WPA/IEEE 802.11i/EAP/IEEE 802.1X features
2. isc-dhcp-server - a dhcp server for providing IP address info.
Both of these projects are well documented and seem pretty straight forward.
Depending on your approach you could deploy a number of these configurations in your home and use the wired networking to collapse them back to a hub which could connect to your cable/dsl modem and with a little routing work - have a multiple access point network.
As I mentioned the Edimax Wifi adapter only supports AC450 speeds - but in many cases that may be more than enough to support a small number of connections and still provide plenty of bandwidth. And at $25 that means your access point would cost you $60.
But going even further - there are also projects out there for the two mesh approaches I discussed olsrd and open80211s that could potentially allow you to create the mesh topologies.
There are threads out there discussing these projects on Raspberry so it is entirely possible to create a meshed WiFi AP Network on Pi.
This is obviously not for the faint at heart and requires and understanding of Linux networking, daemons, etc. But it is certainly an interesting project.
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