Recently, I came across a project called “Internet in a Box” which collects free resources from the internet, such as free courses and e-books, stores them on a large-capacity hard drive, and connects it to a Raspberry Pi to be donated to schools in underdeveloped countries. This allows students without access to the internet to gain a wealth of knowledge.

My friend He.RO^[1] and I discussed “Internet in a Box” and found the concept quite cool. He recommended an open-source project called iiab^[2] for building offline web data.

After considering the above open-source projects, I transformed the “Internet in a Box” into a more geeky, down-to-earth, and practical tool, naming it “Resource Guru’s Magic Router and Portable Private Server” (this long name was inspired by the Fourth Hokage [manual dog head]).

Specific introduction:

Transforming Raspberry Pi 3B into an OpenWrt soft router, becoming a powerful router for magical WiFi internet access.^[3]

Syncing the resources on the Raspberry Pi-mounted hard drive to the internet: https://www.v2fy.com/p/2021-07-17-it-1626503043000/^[4]

Functions Provided by “Resource Guru’s Magic Router and Portable Private Server”

• Can achieve WiFi to WiFi conversion anytime and anywhere, with the converted WiFi having magical internet access features;
• Can mount large-capacity hard drives and distribute the resources on the hard drive via WiFi to connected devices;
• Can use the open-source project frp for internal network mapping, allowing real-time mapping of resources on the hard drive to the internet, providing password-free download links better than any commercial cloud storage products;
• Can freely add or delete resources on the hard drive using FTP protocol;
• When connected to the internet, can serve as a website server and mobile router; when disconnected, can serve as a LAN server providing offline resources to connected devices.
• Can install ad-blocking plugins, NetEase Cloud unlocking plugins, JD auto sign-in plugins, and other handy features…

Advantages

• Low power consumption, with Raspberry Pi averaging below 5W, and being a product from the foundation, it has excellent hardware design and is not profit-driven, making it cheap!
• Easy to make, requiring only a Raspberry Pi, an external network card, and a hard drive;
• Portable, with the magic router being palm-sized;
• Built on the Linux-based router distribution OpenWrt system, stable! Can run for years without being turned off;
• Can be powered by a power bank, making it easy to carry around;

This “Resource Guru’s Magic Router and Portable Private Server” is perfect for use in bookstores, cafes, libraries, airports, etc.; once connected to the router, it can directly provide magical internet access to all your devices, allowing for fast downloads of various programs and dependencies, and you can log into the router via SSH to download quality resources from the internet to the mounted hard drive, selecting content worth sharing and updating it under your resource domain. This way, it neither occupies the precious hard drive space of your PC and phone nor prevents useful materials from being kept on your device.

Originally, the Raspberry Pi was provided as a “programming computer” for underdeveloped areas, but I, as a programmer who interacts with code daily, have found some interesting uses; the motivation is to solve existing problems, such as expensive cloud server resources (bandwidth is extremely costly), poor usability of domestic cloud storage (cloud storage does not support direct mounting), frequent download failures for programming dependencies (domestic networks are unfriendly to overseas websites)… I invested a lot of time and ultimately succeeded in creating a product that I needed but was not available on the market…

Zhaoolee treats blogging as a method of auxiliary thinking. I believe that “lifelong learning” is a correct but hollow slogan, while “lifelong blogging” is an action guide with a forcing mechanism; a blog that is well-written and frequently updated is likely written by someone who often thinks and learns; whereas someone who merely speaks of “lifelong learning” has only a small chance of being a person who often thinks and learns.

However, blogging on the internet has its barriers. If writing on content platforms, various keywords can lead to article bans, which can dampen a person’s enthusiasm for blogging; writing on a self-built website, if one forgets to renew the server, looking back at the content originally stored on the server may have been deleted by the cloud service provider. In extreme cases, after a hundred years, who would renew the server for you?

The above solutions I provide can solve the data preservation issue, with data and servers stored locally, roughly the size of a deck of cards, and only as tall as a standing one-yuan coin. When connected to the internet, it can be accessed by anyone on the internet, and when disconnected, it can still be accessed by people on the local network. After a hundred years, there’s no need for anyone to renew the server for you; you just need to place the private server data on a site like GitHub that offers free cloud storage. Anyone interested in your thoughts during your lifetime can simply copy a copy of your private server to fully access the knowledge you researched during your lifetime, making your knowledge part of humanity’s knowledge system. I will later develop an open-source program similar to a heartbeat packet that will save all publicly available resources to various free hosting platforms on the internet when the private cloud server is about to stop running.

I often see some friends showing off their hardware device scores, but high-scoring hardware ends up being used to run large games; this operation is actually a waste; first, the improvement in hardware does little for the gaming experience, and games that rely on hardware upgrades for graphics and thus score high are often not that fun, like the early version of “Cyberpunk 2077”, which was a graphics card killer and a bug simulator… Second, personal PCs with Windows installed are general-purpose machines; buying extreme hardware at a super high price just to play games is a waste of resources. Instead of gaming, it’s better to buy a console, which is optimized and offers a better experience at a lower price; third, when users can only verify the performance of their machines through scores, it indicates that they do not know how to use it in a cooler way, so they can only use it as a score simulator… If high-performance hardware is not needed, it’s better to get a Raspberry Pi; it’s cheap, and if you can think smartly, it can bring you greater enjoyment than just showing off scores.

This article will be permanently updated at:

理工男生资源达人的梦想,树莓派低成本创造私人专属互联网的构想

References