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)

Displaying secret codes and messages


Let's say that you need to leave your fellow agents a message in a particular location, but you don't want anyone else to know what it contains. You could write the encoded message on a piece of paper so it could be decoded by hand, but it would be much more convenient to show the encoded message electronically on a display, so it can easily be changed—even from a remote location.

For this project, we're going to use Ciseco's Pi-Lite board, which sits on top of the Raspberry Pi, plugged into the GPIO connector. It features a matrix of 126 LEDs combined with a small microcontroller enabling the device to be easily programmed using the Pi's serial port:

Ciseco Pi-Lite board contains 126 LEDs

Enabling the serial port

Before we can access the serial port we need to enable it for our own use on the Pi, as by default, it's used for the terminal console. Fortunately, this is now straightforward on the latest Raspbian releases:

  1. Launch the Raspberry Pi configuration...