Book Image

Raspberry Pi for Secret Agents - Third Edition

Book Image

Raspberry Pi for Secret Agents - Third Edition

Overview of this book

This book is for all mischievous Raspberry Pi owners who’d like to see their computer transform into a neat spy gadget to be used in a series of practical pranks and projects. No previous skills are required to follow along, and if you’re completely new to Linux, you’ll pick up much of the basics for free. We’ll help you set up your Raspberry Pi Zero, Raspberry Pi 2 and Raspberry Pi 3 and guide you through a number of pranks and secret agent techniques that are so inconspicuous yet high on mischief. You’ll learn how to configure your operating system for maximum mischief and start exploring audio, video, or Wi-Fi techniques. We’ll show you how to record, listen, or talk to people from a distance and how to set up your own phone network. Then, you’ll plug in your webcam and set up a motion detector with an alarm and find out what the other computers on your Wi-Fi network are up to. Once you’ve mastered the techniques, we’ll combine them with a battery pack and GPS for the ultimate off-road spy kit.
Table of Contents (7 chapters)

Building a laser trip wire


You may have seen Wallace and Gromit's short film, The Wrong Trousers, where the penguin uses a contraption to control Wallace in his sleep, making him break into a museum to steal the big shiny diamond. The diamond is surrounded by laser beams, but when one of the beams is broken, the alarms go off and the diamond is protected with a cage!

In this project, I'm going to show you how to set up a laser beam and have our Raspberry Pi alert us when the beam is broken— aka a laser trip wire. For this, we're going to need to use a Waveshare Laser Sensor module (www.waveshare.com), which is readily available to buy on Amazon for around £10 / $15.

The module comes complete with jumper wires, that allow us to easily connect it to the GPIO connector in the Pi:

The Waveshare laser sensor module contains both the transmitter and receiver

How it works

The module contains both a laser transmitter and receiver. The laser beam is transmitted from the gold tube on the module at a...