Raspberry Pi Hacks

Chapter 3. Raspberry Pi Around the House

Your Raspberry Pi has one handy feature when it comes to household projects: its size. You can easily hide it in a wall or behind a piece of furniture or put it inside larger build projects like robots and costumes.

This chapter will give you ideas for using your Raspberry Pi for assorted projects around the house, from the practical (like [Hack #31], printing from all your computers to one printer) to the simply fun (like [Hack #35], using your Pi in your next Halloween costume).

Hack 30. Share Files with Samba

We accept that there’s a possibility not all of the computers in your house run Linux. Some might even use Windows (like that one used for PlayOn in [Hack #54]). In that case, this hack should help your systems communicate.

Samba is an open source suite of tools for SMB/CIFS clients. In plainspeak, it lets a Linux computer (like your Raspberry Pi) talk to a Windows machine as if it were a Windows file or print server.

SMB (Server Message Block) is a protocol for sharing files, printers, and assorted communications. CIFS (Common Internet File System) is the modern form of SMB. SMB was designed to run on the NetBIOS API and runs by default on versions of Windows since Windows 2000. Samba started as a project to reverse engineer SMB to allow users on Microsoft systems to access files on Sun systems.

Samba works by creating a network share for directories and subdirectories you choose on your Raspberry Pi. From your Windows machine, you can ...