This is a great little hack that doesn’t require much knowledge to do. Alex Eames had purchased a little ethernet breakout board from DealExtreme and, following a thread on the Raspberry Pi forums, connected it up to the Pi via the SPI bus. A little change to the /boot/config.txt to load the correct driver and voila, an ethernet connection! Having got it working on an A+, he transferred it over to a Zero. It’s a little slow, but it’s perfect for IoT applications. Find out how he did it here.

Photo credit: Alex Eames