Raspberry Pi Travel Router - RaspAP (2024)

a little while ago I made a video on how to turn your Raspberry Pi into a travel router the good news is that's been one of my most popular videos the bad news is that video is a little bit out of date it'll still work if you're trying to connect to another network via the ethernet Jack using an ethernet cord but if you're trying to use this as a Wi-Fi repeater it won't work in that video I was using the W built-in Wi-Fi adapter both to connect to another Network and as a Hotpot where my other devices can connect to it the RAS AP software now no longer supports a one adapter to get this done we need another USB Wi-Fi dongle that's Raspberry Pi compatible just like this one in this video I'm going to take you step by step on how to get this done from installation to completion let's get into it here we are in the Raspberry Pi imager software Ware this is version 1.8.5 make sure you're using a later version of the Raspberry Pi imagees software as this will save you a lot of time I have my micro SD card already inserted into my card reader and the OS we're choosing is Raspberry Pi OS light though I'm choosing the 64-bit version the 32-bit version will also work and make sure you choose the right storage media device my 32 gigabyte card is in there is this will erase the contents of your media and we're we're going to hit next go to edit settings and this is where we can do all our different settings we don't have to go into the terminal now to do all these settings so I set the host name to rasp AP I set my default username and password I already set the home network I have already so I don't have to configure that later and then we're going to go choose our wireless land settings uh country settings the time zones and then the last thing you need to do is go into services and make sure you enable SSH and use password authentication we're going to go ahead and hit save and then say yes go to yes and this will now write and verify our installation I have to put in my password here and we'll speed this up okay now everything has been written and verified and now we're going to insert our micro SD card into the Raspberry Pi and be ready to boot this up so now I have the Raspberry Pi booted up I actually have the ethernet cable plugged into it which is not mandatory but it does speed up the process here now we're in terminal and we're not going to do a lot of the commands that we did in the previous video because we've saved time we already have our PI password set the Wi-Fi set and the host name set now because I'm on on my Mac I can just go into my raspberry Pi by doing rasp ap. looc now rasp AP is the host name that we set now if this does not work because you're on a Windows machine you can either install bonjour on your Windows machine or you can just try to find the IP address so instead of saying rasp ap. local you could just type in the IP address here so I'm going to go ahead and do this I'm going to say yes type in my password and now I'm in my Raspberry Pi and there's first before we install the rasp AP software we need to update our Raspberry Pi so the first thing we need to do is pseudo app update and this is what you should do probably for every Raspberry Pi that you create you should already do all the upgrades here and then I'm going to go pseudo apt upgrade I'll go Dy so it'll say yes to every prompt after that and this will take a little while to update so I'm just going to go ahead and speed through this right now okay so the Raspberry Pi has finished updating that took actually a few minutes the times will vary based on the model of Raspberry Pi that you have in your internet connection it's mainly on the model Raspberry Pi that you have uh older versions will take longer but it it is now updated and now we're ready to install the rasp AP software to install the rasp AP software we're going to do it through the terminal but first we need to go to the rasp ap.com website and go to docs and go down and copy this command here and we're going to go ahead and paste it in the terminal we're going to hit okay and we're going to hit yes to most of these things until the end and the end we'll have some optional things here but most of these things we want to say yes to and some of the recommended ones we do want to say yes to as well so this will take a minute or two to install so I said yes to some of the recommended services but here we come to some of the um optional services so this one is the add blocking service I'm going to say no then the next couple are VPN Services I'm going to say no to both of them but I will just say this does have VPN support with openvpn and wire guard so you can connect automatically to an openvpn or a wire God guard server or actually a third party Service as well and this one is the thirdparty service uh packages there but I'm going to go ahead and say no to it and this will complete our installation so I'm going to hit yes on the reboot but when I after I do that I'm going to go ahead and disconnect my ethernet cable if you're doing this wirelessly of course you don't have to do that but we're going to just go all Wireless from now on so let me give you an overview of what is going on we have our Raspberry Pi with the rasp AP software and I'm using a Raspberry Pi 4 which has a built-in Wi-Fi adapter or interface and that's usually given the IDE of w Lan Z and then we're using a USB dongle Wi-Fi dongle and that's given an ID of w Lan one so we have these two wireless interfaces by default rasp AP and if you follow the documentation on the rasp website it makes W l0 our built-in interface the hotspot where all our devices are connected to this is basically creating a new Wi-Fi network a local Wi-Fi network that our devices will connect to and then wlan1 is responsible for connecting to the internet Internet connecting to a coffee Shop's Wi-Fi or your home network or your public Wi-Fi if you follow all the documentation you can get everything to work but in my experience the performance is not that great especially when it comes to the internet connection to have this work and perform optimally we need to switch up the wireless interfaces and have WL one be the hotspot and WLAN zero connect to the internet now this has to do with the type of adapters they are now wlan0 is an 80211 AC Wi-Fi adapter and WLAN 1 our USB doll goes an 80211 and adapter the AC is faster and has better range we need to have better range when we connect to another Wi-Fi network and since we're using this as a travel router we can assume that most of our devices are right next to it or nearby so WL one adapter as our hotspot is is good enough in other words you need to have a better performing Wi-Fi adapter connected to the internet and the other one as your Hotpot you can find AC Wi-Fi adapters that are Raspberry Pi compatible but I don't have experience using them now our Raspberry Pi is all booted up now one thing I'll assume is that your Wi-Fi dongle is already inserted into your Raspberry Pi I've actually had it inserted in throughout this whole process already now if you don't have it inserted in you can go ahead and do it now it's not a big deal you might have to wait a few minutes for it to join your home network okay so but we're going to go into the raspberry rasp AP interface and for us is rasp ap. looc or you can type in the IP address here it's admin and the default password is secret and we're here in the rasp AP control panel and remember what we want to do now is have W Land one as our hotspot right now wl0 is set to be the Hotpot and then WLAN one is connecting to our home network so we need to configure our hotspot for wl0 or W Land one to to be the Hotpot and we're going to do a few configurations here I'm going to go into my security I'm going to change this to Ras pass go into advance and make sure our country code is set to the right one for our case it's us United States and we're going to hit save settings so we've configured rasp AP and told it that W Land one needs to be our new Hots spot but do not reboot at this time if you do reboot it's not going to work without doing the next steps we have two issues here W land zero even though we told it not to be the hot spot still has some entries in the Raspberry Pi to be configured as a hot spot and then W Land one you even though we told it to be a hotspot in the RAS AP interface it's still going to try to connect and will connect to our preconfigured home network and that's the home network that I configured in the Raspberry Pi imaging software so we need to do two things first we need to delete any entry of WL zero our built-in Network to be any configuration of it as a hotspot and then we need to delete any entry of our preconfigured Network so this means that we need to go back into terminal we're back in terminal and we're logged into our Raspberry Pi already so first we're going to delete any entry of WL zero as a hotspot so we're going to go pseudo and then you're going to use your editor of choice I usually use VI but for the purposes of this demo I'm going to do Nano we're going to go SLC DHCP cd.com and we're going to go down to where it says rasp AP wl0 configuration now these are configurations for wl0 to be a hotspot and since we set W Lan one as a Hotpot it already put it in the configurations for that so we're going to delete these lines five lines right here you can go to the line that you want to delete in Nano you can say contrl k as many times and then we're going to do contrl X say yes hit enter and now we have that entry deleted next we're going to delete any preconfigured network entry in our system here so we're going to do two commands here pseudo RMC capital N Network you can hit tab to autocomplete for you then system connections then you can hit tab again but it'll it should be only one file in there called preconfigured NM connection so we're going to hit enter that deletes that file and next we're going to delete the WPA supplicant file which has the actual entries of what your network adapter should be configured to so we're going to go pseudo RM EC WPA supplicant wpas supple. comom and now we have both files deleted from our system and lastly we can go pseudo reboot now when I hit enter in here we are no longer going to be able to connect to our Raspberry Pi through our home network we have to connect to the Raspberry Pi's hotspot that it will create through WL one so the Raspberry Pi has rebooted I see the network that it created connected to it and now we need to go into the rasp AP control panel again and tell the Raspberry Pi our repeater which wi-fi network to connect to so we can go to rasp ap. looc now if you're using an IP address your new IP address will be 10.9.1 41.1 but we're going to go ahead and use Ras B.L and the admin our default password secret and now we're in our Ras AP control panel and we're going to go to Wi-Fi client here and if you run into this error called re reinitialize you're can to hit rescan and your Wi-Fi networks should show up after that now if you keep on going into that Loop of rescanning and it keeps on giving you that error go ahead and reboot the Raspberry Pi and it should work again so now we just need to connect to our home network and we're good to go and then to demonstrate that this is working we're here on my iPad and I'm connected to the Hotpot that we created but I haven't fully configured the Wi-Fi network so if we go to a website this will not connect to it we need a configure the rasp AP software to connect to the Wi-Fi network that we're on so if we go to rasp p. Loco I got to type in my username and password and this is what I would do when I go to another location or a coffee shop I'd have to go into the rasp P control panel and go to my Wi-Fi client here and connect to the network that I want to so I'm going to connect to my home network here and once you hit add Network you add it to the list and it doesn't necessarily connect to it right away so you might have to hit connect and this should connect to our Wi-Fi network after that so I see that it's connected and now I can go to a website let's say everyday tech.vs Pi into a travel router I'll leave links below to other Wi-Fi adapters that are Raspberry Pi compatible you need to make sure that they are Raspberry Pi compatible if you found this video helpful hit that like button consider hitting that subscribe button until the next one see you

Channel: Everyday Tech

Views: 85,706

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Id: 3PvDqb66Rw4

Length: 15min 5sec (905 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 28 2024