We’ve just ordered one of these in to the office. It’s a mash-up of the computerey goodness of a Raspberry Pi and the hardware interfacing abilities of an Arduino. We just can’t wait to get our hands on it and find new depth in our projects. What we’re most excited about is the opportunity to link our hardware directly to databases and other Internet sources without having to use another piece of hardware.

We love free public Wifi – who doesn’t (especially when you’re in a busy area where mobile data is slow)? With this in mind, in addition to us wanting to find projects for our Raspberry Pi, we set out to create a public WiFi hotspot.

While the task of creating a hotspot is easy, we wanted to add the functionality of a ‘captive portal’. A captive portal is when you connect to a hotspot and are presented with a page (you often have to agree to terms) before you are granted access. This is a great idea for advertisers who want to provide WiFi and to show the end user who has supplied this via adverts in static image or video form.

Using a Raspberry Pi, a WiFi dongle and a 4G modem we’ve managed to create a truly mobile hotspot for us to use at events. Pretty handy!