Using the Raspberry Pi Zero as aWiFi range extender and an IOT device

The Raspberry pi zero is an amazing device with outstanding features. With in built wifi and bluetooth it can easily be turned into an IOT device to control various peripherals. In this article i will explain, how i turned my pi zero into a wifi range extender from scratch.

You will get a list of all attached drives and can easily identify the newly inserted card. In my case the device was listed as /dev/disk2 Once done , proceed to unmount the device by typing the following

Next we burn the .img file that we downloaded to the disk

After a few minutes, the image file will have been written to the micro sd card.

We then mount the sd card back(Mac OS does this automatically for us) and create a blank file named “ssh”. This is so that we can ssh into our freshly minted Pi zero. On the Mac, the sd card will show up as /Volumes/boot , we need to create the “ssh” file in this folder. Next we need to setup internet on our Pi to download the required packages. We can do this in 2 ways,

The next step is to put the micro SD card on the Pi zero and wait for a few seconds , for it to boot up. We will now ssh into the Pi and install 2 packages,

We do this in the following way on the ssh terminal

Once installed , we disable hostapd and dnsmasq so that they do not start automatically on booting up.

Next step is editing the /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf file .Enter the following details

Next to enable hostapd to use this file, we will edit /etc/default/hostapd and add the following line to it

Next edit /etc/dnsmasq.conf and add the following lines at the end

Our access point will give out IP addresses in the range of 192.168.2.2 to 192.168.2.50 and we will use Google’s DNS server(8.8.8.8) for name resolution.

Next edit /etc/network/interfaces to add our virtual device

Next add a script which will start the hostapd and dnsmasq service , the script is named /usr/local/bin/piapstart and has the following contents

I wanted my Pi zero to be completely portable and have the ability to edit the SSID easily through a web page ,that i can access via the Pi zero access point. To do this i installed apache and php on the pi zero.

Finally we need to put all of this in the startup script /etc/rc.local

Every time we change the SSID details using the php script, we need to reboot our Pi zero for the changes to take effect. Using the Pi zero in this mode, we can use it for many production grade real life situations where the user can control all his devices using the Pi zero.

Thanks to the following links for inputs

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