Most off-the-shelf travel routers are only good for a handful of things. They can share a Wi-Fi network, run a VPN, and even share files. The travel router I built out of a Raspberry Pi can do everything a regular travel router can, but it can do almost anything else you can imagine. Here are 5 ways I’ve expanded what my travel router can do.
The Raspberry Pi Travel router doubles as a backup PC
It might not be fast, but it can be helpful in a pinch
On two separate occasions, I’ve had a laptop die when I was away from my desktop PC. Fortunately, it didn’t happen in a situation where I urgently needed it, but it did teach me a lesson: always have a backup plan.
My Raspberry Pi travel router is now part of my backup plan. If an issue were to arise with my laptop, I could plug the Pi into my portable monitor, add a keyboard, and immediately obtain a fully operational desktop.
While it won’t replace a full desktop or a laptop, the Pi can still manage essential tasks. When I tested it as a desktop replacement, I was able to read and write files to external drives, connect to my normal remote services, access the internet, and do some writing. It was a bit slow, but it worked.
My Pi travel router is built around a Pi 4, but a Raspberry Pi 5 would definitely be even better. The ability to boot from a dedicated NVMe SSD alone provides a huge performance boost over a microSD card or even a SATA SSD, and it has more RAM and a faster processor, which would make the desktop performance much better.
- Brand
-
Raspberry Pi
- Storage
-
8GB
- CPU
-
Cortex A7
- Memory
-
8GB
- Operating System
-
Raspbian
- Ports
-
4 USB-A
It’s only recommended for tech-savvy users, but the Raspberry Pi 5 is a tinkerer’s dream. Cheap, highly customizable, and with great onboard specs, it’s a solid base for your next mini PC.
My Pi Router can run real productivity apps
A tiny personal cloud in my backpack
Most travel routers only give you a settings page and perhaps a few extra features if you’re lucky; that’s all they do.
By self-hosting services like Nextcloud and Joplin on my Pi, I ensure they’re always available, no matter where I am or whether I can access the internet.
Hotel Wi-Fi can be unreliable, slow, or locked down, and I’ve sometimes needed to work when I don’t even have cell service. Because I can run my important tools locally, but my productivity services still function perfectly.
The Pi also works like a portable cloud server that syncs instantly across all my devices, lets me access files without leaning on third-party storage services, and ensures that my data is stored privately and securely on my own hardware.
I’ve only fallen back on it this way on a handful of occasions, but it is nice to know the option is there.
It can host a game server anywhere
I bring the LAN party with me
The primary reasons I built my Pi travel router were versatility and resilience. It can host services, act as a backup PC, and more.
But I’ve also discovered that it can be fun, too. I can set up a tiny game server on a Raspberry Pi.
It can handle a vanilla Minecraft server for a few people, Terarria, and other lightweight game servers. Game servers—so long as you don’t add a ton of people and don’t do anything super demanding in-game—are less demanding on your hardware than you might expect, so you’d probably be able to run a huge range of servers if you wanted to.
Older games that have servers that support Arm are also good candidates, since they’re also often easy to run.
The Pi 4 can run AI
The models are small but not useless
The Raspberry Pi 4 (8GB) isn’t designed for AI workloads, but it actually can run some optimized models without too much of an issue.
I’ve used it to intelligently search through long technical documents and help with simple coding snippets, but you could certainly do more if you used the right model. For example, Gemma 4 has a variant that would probably be viable as a self-hosted assistant, even on a Pi 4.
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The big benefit is that it operates without an internet connection or subscription.
The Pi 5 is the AI upgrade
As smaller models get smarter, I’ve been tempted to upgrade my Pi travel router to a Pi 5 with an AI HAT+ 2 attached. The hat alone adds 16GB of VRAM, which is enough to run many respectable models locally, and the Pi 5 can be purchased with up to 16GB of RAM too.
It is actually a reasonable device for edge AI uses.
The Pi travel router can run a Pi-hole
DNS Filtering is a network-wide adblock
Pi-hole is a network-level ad blocker that sits between your devices and the internet, acting as a “DNS sinkhole” to ensure that any request for an ad or tracker domain never reaches your device.
I installed it directly on my router, which means every device that connects—whether I’m at a coffee shop or on hotel Wi-Fi—gets instant protection from ads, trackers, and some telemetry.
A Pi travel router is a traveling Swiss army knife
The Pi isn’t limited to just those uses either. Any service you can self-host could conceivably be run on a Pi travel router, turning a basic security and convenience device into almost anything you want.
You can even add additional hardware that connects to the USB ports or the GPIO pins to create something really unique, like a travel router with an air quality monitor on it.