WiFi AP

If the PineCube will have a wired Ethernet connection to the main network it is possible to use it as a WiFi access point, possibly extending your existing network to further outside. Here are some steps you can take to do this starting from an Armbian system as a starting point. Note that you may need to upgrade your kernel to 5.13.x for this to work well.

  • Install bridge-utils package using apt-get

  • Add the following to your /etc/network/interfaces to set up both the eth0 Ethernet interface and the br0 bridge interface (change br0 to manual if static IP is preferred)

    /etc/network/interfaces:
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet manual
       pre-up /sbin/ifconfig $IFACE up
       pre-down /sbin/ifconfig $IFACE down
auto br0
iface br0 inet dhcp
       bridge_ports eth0
       bridge_stp on

  • Edit the /etc/default/hostapd uncommenting the line with ‘DAEMON_CONF="/etc/hostapd.conf"’

  • Edit the /etc/hostapd.conf to set the SSID, password and channel for your AP.

  • Run sudo systemctl enable hostapd.service to enable the hostapd service on startup

  • Reboot your cube with the ethernet cable connected