Ad blocker controller

This is technically a very simple laser project but I had a lot of fun putting it together and wanted to share.

We use PiHole at home to block most internet ads in our entire network. It’s very nice but sometimes you want to click on a relevant ad (read: google ads). So I made this to control it.

The buttons across the bottom temporarily disable the blocker and the switch on the right permanently disables it while it’s on. The screen shows a histogram of the last 3 hours of blocked requests and there’s some stats on top of that.

It runs on a Raspberry Pi Zero W and took a couple hundred lines of Python, and some fiddling with configuration but it’s been working fine all day today so I’m happy.

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What a cool and handy project!

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Huh. Can sites tell you have an ad blocker, with PiHole? I block ads because I have a vestibular disorder and moving / blinky / flashy things on my screen make me dizzy, but a lot of sites can tell and won’t display their content for me unless I turn it off. :frowning:

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Some will, some won’t.

As it’s become more popular, more sites have found ways to detect it.

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Some sites can still detect that you are blocking their ads but it hasn’t been an issue for us. Normally I just close whatever website is forcing me to turn ads on but if I really wanted to see it, I could press the 3 minute button and see the website with ads.

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You’re way out of my league lol.

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I’ve got one running just basic pihole. Works pretty good for most things. Browser blockers get the rest and most sites that I can’t get to aren’t nearly important enough to bother getting to.

Wow, that’s amazing.

It looks like a depth finder for fishing (not phishing).

Neat project. I need to learn python…I suppose containment is a perfect time to pick it up. That makes 23 things I am try ing to learn during containment. It is overwhelming!

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Way above my pay grade lol.

I don’t know who started the problem, if the Ad Blocker got more sophisticated or the GFUI started getting more elaborate, but suddenly I can’t load from the first page, or access any of the GFUI specials like outline or the noun project stuff.

It was getting really annoying so I finally posted to support and they pointed this out, so I whitelisted the pages and everything works now :grin: Who’da thunk!

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