Monthly Archives: February 2020

Wearable Wi-Fi Enabled Lanyard

29 Saturday Feb 2020

Posted by in Projects

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This was a fun project. I wanted to build an 8 x 8 matrix LED name tag that I could control with my smart phone. It was to display my name, title, company and business interests all in scrolling text.

Esp-01 lanyard
Wearable Wi-Fi Access Point

The project uses an Esp-01, Adafruit I2C backpack with 8X8 matrix LED and a 3.7 volt lithium ion battery. The code is written in C/C++ using the Arduino development environment and it’s pretty straightforward. The processor acts as a Wi-Fi access point and simple HTTP requests control the output to the 8X8 matrix LED.

Securing Raspberry Pi

28 Friday Feb 2020

Posted by in How to guides

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This guide will walk you through a series of steps to configure really basic security for your Raspberry Pi.  First create a new user and remove the default pi account. 

Create a new user account

sudo useradd -m newuser -G sudo
sudo passwd newuser

Then ensure that the new newuser account uses bash. Simply add bin/bash to the newuser account if needed.

sudo vi /etc/passwd

Logout and login as newuser. Make sure everything works for the newuser and then remove pi account.

sudo deluser -remove-home pi

Install Firewall

Install the open source firewall and enable two ports. I like to enable secure shell access (ssh) and file access from my Mac laptop Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) over TCP. 

sudo apt-get -y install ufw
sudo ufw allow 22
sudo ufw allow 548
sudo ufw enable
sudo ufw status

I do this for all of my Raspberry Pi servers. I’m sure more could be done but that’s for later post.