What projects is everyone working on?

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Part of what makes GameShell cool is how extensible and hackable it is. For that reason, I’m sure some of you have other things that you’ve tinkered with or worked on before. So, while we are all awaiting the arrival of the GameShell, I’m curious to hear what the community is working on until then.

Personally, I have a few projects I’m working on since during the holidays I acquired 3x Raspberry Pi 3 Model B’s, 4x Raspberry Pi Zero v1.3’s, 2x Raspberry Pi Zero W’s, 2x ESP-12e’s, 1x TP-Link MR3020 and already had a Raspberry Pi 2 Mobel B+ on hand from a few years ago. Here’s some of my plans for these lovelies:

  1. Using one of the RPi 3B’s and the 4x RPi Zero v1.3’s, I am hooking them up with a ClusterHAT to NFS boot them all as a cluster (supercomputer) for distributed programming.

  2. Connecting two of the RPi 3B’s together as a master-slave cluster to use the slave as a DIY arcade/thin client from the master. Ideally I’d like to setup a cloning system to use the master node to store images of the slave for quick backup/restoring.

  3. Modding one of the RPi Zero W’s with a USB header into a PoisonTap.

  4. Making one of the ESP-12e’s into a Deauther.

  5. Turning the TP-Link MR3020 into a Piratebox.

  6. Turning the RPi 2B+ into a programmable virtual assistant using the Jasper project.

Those are a few of the projects I’m on undertaking over the next few months (disclaimer, for projects 3 & 4 these will be staying at home as “trophies”, not something I plan to maliciously use).

What tinkering projects are you all working on / have previously worked on?

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I’d love to see your little forest when it’s done. Doing replica? Medical school application rejected. Now I’m too afraid to click on Jasper. Is that anything like Cain and Abel?

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By forest I assume you meant the RPi Zero cluster? If so, this is what it looks like right now. I only have it unboxed, nothing setup yet. image

As for Jasper, it’s just an open source derivative of Amazon’s Alexa, similar to Mycroft. My main reason for picking it is that the developer API is in Python, which is what I’m using in my other projects right now.

EDIT: I just looked at Mycroft again and noticed they’re using Python as well now… Which requires at least the RPi 3. Now I remember why I went with Jasper for the RPi 2B+.

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Many distributed architectures rely on a single designated ‘master’ to direct and manage the operations of the cluster. In MarkLogic’s distributed architecture, all hosts are considered equal, regardless of the roles for which they are configured. Consequently, there is no designated ‘master’ in the cluster.
…
Large volumes of content can be supported by increasing the number of hosts hosting forests.
https://docs.marklogic.com/guide/cluster/distributed

I’m not exactly sure what any of that means. I chose the word forest because that sounded fantastic. I don’t know why you would need AI or what it could do, but the best of luck to you!

P.S. I think the clusters tend to collect forests of some kind, like a biome. The information forms a harmonious web. Whatever causes what information to activate in response to what stimuli is a question that the net answers itself. The forests grow outwards in a self-directed direction and find themselves shaped by their input.

PoisonTap - siphons cookies, exposes internal router & installs web backdoor on locked computers

I actually took some poison earlier, not looking to do that on purpose.

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What am I tinkering with right now? My brother bought a little gem for me over the holidays, and this GameShell for my birthday. I’m working on learning Microsoft Server technology. In all honesty, I’m a biologist. But I don’t have enough friends with whom to play this game:

I met an iguana named Tequila who had bright orange eyes and an orgiastic strut; she chomped heartily on some fat, succulent greens. Though her skin was like sandpaper, she was very sweet.

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At my job I maintain HPC clusters and write software to manage them, so although I said it’d be a master/slave configuration it will actually be a closer to a controller/host relationship where the controller orchestrates and allocates tasks for the host. While I’m beginning with only two nodes (the controller and host), the setup I’m planning will allow for other hosts to more or less be added on with easy by cloning over the image of the first host and changing the hostname on the new device.

The PoisonTap is more just something fun I want to have for the sake of having it. I’ve always been interested in computer security so I thought having the PoisonTap would be a nice toy to have if anything for the sake of the nerd-cred it brings with it. Same thing goes for the Deauther with the growing ecosystem of public Wi-Fi hotspots available, just a nice toy to have for the sake of having and both keep a very small footprint for what they are.

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I’m working on learning Microsoft Server technology.

If you don’t mind my asking, why Microsoft Servers? And specifically what technologies with it?

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Yes, you have a part of your brain called the dorsal striatum ─ that encapsulates the caudate nucleus, putamen, that abstracts the substantia nigra, etc ─ that inputs information from the thalmus that takes edge from the amygdala. This module has a role that determines motivation, especially hunger, sexuality, etc. This would be like a controller, but it itself lies in flux with its interactors.

I went to GA Tech for graduate school in MsINFS, but I only took one class. I received an A, but I was pressured to leave. I decided after that that security did not interest me. I talked to my uncle, who was actually a software architect for HP, and he recommended the MSCA certification as a mode of entry into the industry of computer science.

I am struggling strenuously to learn Server, as the information is unlike most anything I experienced previously. Also, I have been distracted by the aforementioned poision. The 2016 election saw blood retracted.

P.S. I have to be careful how I phrase things because witches are real here, and they are definitely meat-eaters. Nevertheless, I understand that other networks invest heavily in such structures. I keep them alive the best I can. Still, no one wants to get eaten by a lion.

“Out of the one who eats came something to eat;
out of the strong came something sweet.”

19 Then the Spirit of the Lord came powerfully upon him. He went down to the town of Ashkelon, killed thirty men, took their belongings, and gave their clothing to the men who had solved his riddle. But Samson was furious about what had happened, and he went back home to live with his father and mother.

P.P.S. If you understood the story, Layla was unbelievably acrid, sinister, and Evil.

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Very interesting and tasty collection of Pi’s and projects! :grin:
I’m very interested in the Cluster project. I’ve tried to build a docker swarm cluster using some Raspberry Pi’s, what software application/framework do you use on the cluster? (Kubernetes, Docker, Apache Spark, Hadoop?).
I wonder how does your ClusterHAT compare to the these ready built Pico3 or 5 on picocluster?
I like the green energy footprint of these ARM clusters, but it looks like the software support is still very limited.

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As I said above, I maintain HPC server clusters, and so I actually don’t use any of those but instead use a combination of the cluster management tools I work on at my company and MPI for distributing the tasks across the compute nodes. The Pico clusters would definitely out-perform the ClusterHAT setup because it uses Raspberry Pi Zeros for the compute nodes while the Pico uses full Raspberry Pis for what it’s doing.

Once I have the software finished and fully tested (I’m porting it from the x86 software stack we use now) I’ll see about open sourcing it in some way.

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What I’m currently calling Project Crown has some headway made (I the last two weekends I was sick and busy with other commitments, so this was my first chance to tackle this again).

The current configuration has the Zeros with no SD card installed and is instead booting over NFS using the clusterhat image made by the developer of the board, which is a derivative of Raspbian. The NFS directories for each of the nodes exists in a directory on the RPi 3 (each Zero getting it’s own directory). In theory, I should be able to have shared directories between all the devices using symlinks, but further testing is needed for this.

IMG_20180210_120147281

As the other master-slave cluster that I’m calling Project Gemini for lack of creativity on my part, I have the head node installed with the ARM version of CentOS 7 and trying to port over the cluster management software my company uses, but I’m running into some difficulties where some of the dependencies have don’t have an ARM version distributed yet, so I’ll need to hard code in replacements for those.

Lastly, I have Piratebox setup on the router, Project Freedom, but I need to figure out how to autoload the intranet homepage for better usage and also try to get some web servers setup on it for porting some of my web projects over to it.

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Sounds wonderful, learned a ton from the the projects you mentioned. Please keep us posted with your project progress, and maybe when you are free, show us in more details on how you setup and use this little arm cluster.

I guess I just can’t help to think about turn all my old smartphone CPU into a cluster computer :joy: , something like this will be a interesting use case for all the wasted arm CPUs lying in my drawer now. :seedling:

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Once I have a finished product for any of the projects I’ll put up a guide on how I made them. As for using old phones, if they have Android and the ability to download BusyBox and debootstrap to chroot into a Debian instance. Then you have a version of Linux to start building the cluster.

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From what I just read, I gather ya’ll buildin’ Argus.

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What I’m working on here is about as powerful as a modern day smartphone, so I would not call it anywhere near what Argus is. The benefit of this setup, though, is the ability to try out distributed computing at a smaller scale, mainly for fun rather than for being able to do anything significant that an full-scale HPC cluster is meant for. Those are the systems I setup at my place of employment, but I’d like to have one at home to play with and since I’m not willing to shell out the thousands of dollars a real HPC cluster costs, I am making do with the ClusterHAT setup here (for now).