We already have a guide on using Pi-Hole with the Raspberry Pi Zero W to send advertisements on your network into a black hole.
But, the PiOLED is small and we want to monitor more statistics at a glance. While we could open the web console to monitor Pi-hole, we can't show that to friends easily. Plus, who doesn't want more shiny, blinky, networking hardware?
We're going to install PADD (Pi-hole Ad Detection Display) and Pi-Hole on the Adafruit 2.8" or 3.5" PiTFT Plus to display useful and fun statistics such as Amount of Pi-holed Advertisements, and the top offending domain attempting to serve pesky advertisements to your network.
Pi-hole is an open-source project which let's your Pi act as a DNS (Domain Name Server). While you may have an ad-blocker installed on your browser, do you have one on your phone? What about blocking in-application advertisements in your mobile games? On your Smart TV? On your smart fridge?
Pi-hole lets you block ads from any device configured to use it as a Domain Name Server. When an advertisement (i.e: ads.adserver.com) tries to resolve it's IP address, Pi-hole will return nothing back. You'll never connect to the advertisement server and the ad won't even load. This makes it quicker, faster, and use less data than conventional ad blockers.
You'll need the following parts to get up-and-running with Pi-hole and PADD
You need a Raspberry Pi with built in wireless. The Raspberry Pi 3 line (3, 3 B, 3 B+) devices are wireless-ready without external configuration:
You'll also need a power supply for your Pi and a MicroSD card for holding the Pi's OS and it's applications:
If you're using a display smaller than 480x320, PADD will boot into a mini mode which displays way less statistics about the network. To view PADD, we suggest using the PiTFT Plus 3.5":
If you happen to have one of our 2.8" or 2.4" PiTFT's, those will work too
We used a Pi 3 case to protect our Pi from aesthetics and to protect our Pi against scratches, bumps, and falls. The case also makes the Pi-hole look like a networking appliance.
If you don't have a way to burn the OS image onto a micro sd card from your computer, we suggest picking up a USB MicroSD reader/writer.
