A Pi-Fi Router

Network engineers aside, most people do not give too much thought to their home network. Just make an Ethernet connection from the cable modem or other device to your router, then happily connect everything to the internet via Wi-Fi and forget about it. Unless you live in an apartment building like the one YouTuber Spencer's Desk lives in, that is. There, the residents have to contend with a nightmarish (for a hardware hacker) networking system called “Community Wi-Fi.”

Little old grandmas everywhere love the ease of using Community Wi-Fi — just enter your password to connect without any of that new-fangled hardware or other whatchamacallits and thingamajigs. But if you are doing more than checking your AOL email and keeping up on the latest news from the world of knitting at Yahoo!, you might run into some problems. Local networking is nonexistent with this arrangement, so something as simple as connecting to a single-board computer via SSH, or sending a job to your 3D printer, is out of bounds.

Worse yet, the network provider prohibits the use of routers, and regularly scans the network to block anything that looks like one. These are clearly inhumane conditions, so Spencer's Desk had to take action. The solution he came up with involved turning a Raspberry Pi, which is not a router, into a router. This keeps the network provider in the dark while allowing Spencer's Desk to control his own local network.

If you know what you are doing, this is not especially difficult to do, as the Raspberry Pi is a full-fledged Linux computer. If you don’t know what you are doing, it is still pretty easy because Spencer's Desk runs through all the necessary steps in the project video. In a nutshell, Raspberry Pi OS Lite is installed on the Pi, then commonly used utilities like dnsmasq and a DHCP server were installed and configured. As a final step, network address translation was turned on so that the Pi’s Ethernet port would have access to the internet via its Wi-Fi connection.

Naturally you will want more than one Ethernet port, so the Pi’s port was connected to the uplink of a TP-Link switch to expand the number of available ports. The hardware was then installed in a custom, 3D-printed case to make things look nice. As a finishing touch, a small OLED display was added to the router to display network statistics.

While optional, Spencer's Desk also showed how a Tailscale VPN can be installed. This addition allows you to remotely access your local network, which can come in handy if you want to do some hacking, or check on your equipment, while you are away.

In a perfect world, there would be no need for this custom router. But we don’t live in a perfect world, so we're fortunate to have hackers like Spencer's Desk to help us get the most out of our hardware.