Everything we build,
written down so you can build it too.
Parts lists, configs, and the decisions that were wrong the first time. Every guide here is free and followable end to end — no email wall, no “full version” upsell. If you follow one and it breaks, say so and the guide gets fixed.
Guides you can actually follow.
Status is marked honestly. Planned means planned — there is no hidden guide behind it.
PWNAGOTCHI
A Tamagotchi that eats WiFi handshakes.
A Pi Zero in a 3D-printed shell with an e-ink face that wanders around collecting WPA handshakes and gets visibly happier the more it finds. It is a genuinely useful WiFi auditing tool wearing a cartoon. The build is the hook; the lesson underneath is how WPA handshakes actually work and why your own network either survives that or doesn't.
- Flash and headless-provision a Pi Zero 2 W with no monitor attached
- Wire and drive a Waveshare e-ink HAT
- How a WPA handshake capture actually works, start to finish
- Audit your own WiFi the way an attacker would, then fix what you find
- Keep the whole thing legal — capture only on networks you own
- Raspberry Pi Zero 2 Wthe original Zero W works, just slower
- Waveshare 2.13" e-ink HATV4 — check the revision, drivers differ
- LiPo battery + charger boardPiSugar is the tidy option
- microSD card32GB, decent brand — cheap cards die
- 3D-printed caseor don't, it runs bare on the desk
RAGNAR
A pocket assessment box that fits in a jacket.
A Pi with an e-ink face running the tools an actual security assessment uses — port scanning, service fingerprinting, vulnerability templates, web app checks, traffic capture — driven from a web UI and reporting to a screen you can read without a laptop open. On a Pi Zero it's a recon device. Dropped onto a mini PC with real RAM it becomes a genuine parallel scanner with CVE correlation. Same software, two very different machines.
Built on Ragnar by PierreGode — MIT-licensed. Their project, our write-up. Go star it.
This one actively scans and probes rather than passively listening. Run it only against networks and systems you own, or where you hold written authorisation to test — a signed scope document, not a verbal nod from a friendly sysadmin. Unauthorised scanning is a crime in most jurisdictions, and the fact that a tool is easy to install has never once been a defence.
- Drive a 2.13" e-ink HAT headless — the same display the Pwnagotchi build uses
- What port scanning, service fingerprinting, and vulnerability templating actually do, rather than which flags to copy
- Read a scan result properly: which findings matter, which are noise, which are the scanner being confidently wrong
- Scope an assessment in writing before you touch anything
- Run the same tooling on a mini PC when a Pi runs out of memory
- Raspberry Pi Zero 2 Wor a Pi 4/5 — advanced mode wants 8GB+ RAM
- Waveshare 2.13" e-Paper HATsame HAT as the Pwnagotchi build
- PiSugar 3power management and a physical button
- microSD card32GB minimum, decent brand
- USB WiFi adapteroptional — an external radio if you need monitor mode
THIN CLIENT LAB
A real homelab out of $25 corporate e-waste.
Offices dump thin clients and micro desktops by the pallet, and they turn up on eBay for the price of lunch. A Wyse or a ThinkCentre Tiny pulls a handful of watts, runs silent, and will happily host containers all year. This is the cluster build: three cheap boxes, real services, and a power bill you won't notice.
- Which thin clients and mini PCs are worth buying, and which are traps
- Get past locked BIOS, tiny eMMC, and soldered RAM
- Measure actual watts and work out the true cost of running it
- Run a multi-node container setup across cheap hardware
- Back it up so a dead $25 box is a shrug, not a weekend
- 2–3 thin clients or micro desktopsWyse 5070, HP t630/t640, ThinkCentre Tiny, Fujitsu Futro
- SATA or NVMe SSDscheck which the model actually takes before buying
- RAM upgradeSODIMM — confirm it isn't soldered
- Gigabit switchany dumb switch will do to start
- Kill-A-Watt or smart plugso the power claims are measured, not guessed
OWN YOUR STACK
Replace the SaaS you're renting with things you run.
The observability, detection, identity, and perimeter stack from the public repo, deployed on one cheap box and explained line by line. Not a compose-file dump — the reasoning behind every decision, including the ones that were wrong first. This is the same baseline that gets deployed for paying clients, which is exactly why it's public: you can read what you'd otherwise be paying for.
- Stand up metrics, logs, and dashboards that you actually look at
- Run event detection at home without drowning in false positives
- Put single sign-on and MFA in front of everything you host
- Close the perimeter: DNS filtering, TLS, egress default-deny
- Back it up and prove the restore works before you need it
Want this run properly, at company scale?
The guides are free because the hard part was never the docker-compose file — it's keeping it alive, patched, and documented while you have other work. That's the part worth paying for. If you run infrastructure for other people, that's probably the conversation.