Access Point Mode on Raspberry Pi with Buildroot

This is a wiki page which describes, documents and also provides some learnings from my final project for ECEN5713 which involved the use of the onboard Wi-Fi adapter. This wiki page will specifically talk about the Wi-Fi adapter and the usage of it as an Access Point for various wireless applications

Motivation

While I was working on my course final project which was a Captive Wi-Fi Gateway, I decided to use the onboard Wi-Fi interface to host the SSID of my network. This requires quite a few changes in the buildroot make menu config. Other than the normal hostapd package, certain firmware packages also have to be enabled. I spent quite some time on figuring out these packages and am therefore documenting it so that one does not have to spend the same amount of time again.

Required Packages

In order to be able to meaningfully host a network via the Wi-Fi interface on the Raspberry Pi, you would need to use the hostapd package. Without hostapd, the Pi would only have a Wi-Fi interface, but it would not behave as a guest access point. In my project, hostapd is what makes the project act like a router or gateway from the client device perspective.

Why hostapd was needed

The project required the Pi to:

• create a Wi-Fi SSID
• accept client associations

Page is a Work In Progress