Ever play with a Raspberry Pi?
 

My 8 yr old son has asked for a laptop for Christmas. He has a tablet already.

The engineer in me has seized the opportunity and ordered him a raspberry pi.

These are like an electric set from my childhood but on steroids. The computing power and simplicity of these sub $100 devices is just incredible.

Who here has played with a pi before? What have you done with it?

Web / file servers, KODI boxes, video security monitors.

They are stupi cheap.

Have 4 or 5.

Huge community out there, do a search.

My son’s robotics class is using them to make task based robots.

A guy I know used on to make trailer brakes simulate ABS, he’ll probably get rich...

i have a rasp pi running retropie , it's very cool

I use mine to ....

1) Provide local DNS for a fake domain for my home LAN
2) Provide ad blocking for all devices by using DNS server in #1 to spoof known advertising domains
3) Throttle speeds of the rest of my family - hard to do homework when competing with 4 youtube streams on a 6mb dsl connection
4) Totally disconnect kids from Internet resources but still allow local network streaming, etc.

i used one as a networked music streamer running a program called volumino several years ago.

I think for hands on fiddeling and fun arduino projects might be more educational for a budding engineer.

LOL, I need this in my life. Car videos set to 100% and cartoons set 1%. Extreme net non-neutrality routing in my house.

As part of a webinar training session, I made the LED on the board blink. Does that count?

Add a second USB NIC to the Pi. Use iptables to set up NAT, DHCP to give out the IP of the secondary NIC as a gateway to the clients, and use wondershaper to control traffic speeds on the kids subnet.

Many moons ago (pre-Win 3.1) I was a programmer. All the cool stuff done today requires and understanding of networks. Where do I go to gain an understanding of networks work and how to manipulate them.

Not really... you don't have to understand didley bout networks.
IF you really want to bother with that, your best bet is to start figuring out the OSI layers.

But it's really pointless.
Most developers where I am haven't got the faintest idea how networks work

Unless you want to develop some kind of network client serrver app virus or packet tracer or sniffer, you don't need any of that.

Loads of developers if not most just don't need it for their cool stuff.
And when they do, they just get an SDK to do the dirty work for em And they will just talk IP host to IP host in the most basic form.
pick a port, and start talking to the other host.


Most people who need a network application for their Pi, just get one already on the open source market.
Building one from scratch in most cases would be like reinventing the wheel

If you have to ask where to start, I'de say Google.
Cause if you can't figure out the start on your own, you certainly won't figure out the rest of Networking from a book.

If all you want is internet , then https://www.ietf.org/standards/rfcs/ is all you need
But like I said, if you wanna build something yourself, It would be like asking for a good way to start making a wheel for your car...

Thanks Stijn!