I just got a raspberry pi 3 working with a 3.5″ screen using Pi-Hole and running the PADD status board.
My largest concern was in buying a 3.5″ TFT from Kuman, and not from adafruit (official vs. not). Fortunately, Kuman has a repo for all of their drivers and displays that work seamlessly with the pi 3.
So after installing raspbian lite, installing pi-hole, installing the Kuman driver for the 3.5″ display hat, and then rotating the display output 180 degrees, then finally installing PADD, I have a working pi-hole unit.
I decided to go with a full raspberry pi 3 instead of a pi 0 (w or otherwise), or a pi 4 for a few reasons:
- I wanted a hardwired connection, since this will be a DNS server for multiple devices I didn’t want the extra latency of wireless or fiddling around with ethernet dongles for the 0. Any money I would save by getting a 0 would be lost in adapters and resulting complications.
- I didn’t want to have to solder on the GPIO pins for the pi 0.
- Most cases for the 3.5″ TFT screens are made to fit a full pi board, not the 0.
- I wanted better specs than the pi 0, but didn’t need the capability of the pi 4.
- I’ve worked with the pi 3 before and I know it’s reliable.
- The canakit for the pi 3 is cheaper than ever, possibly due to the popularity of the pi 4. The pi 4 would have been overkill for this project.
After building, I pointed my phone, my tablet, and my tv at the raspberry pi, and started browsing and watching. After 18 hours of uptime, 709 requests have been blocked out of 8001. I have noticed sites like imgur and Questionable Content running much smoother, and have seen an overall decrease in ads on mobile sites for articles. My next step will be to point my desktop at it, and see how it affects gaming (if there’s any notable lag).
So for all of $80, I have network level ad blocking across as many devices as I want. Not too shabby.