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How to use Raspberry Pi as a bridged access point?
In order to work as a bridged access point, the Raspberry Pi needs to have the hostapd access point software package installed: sudo apt install hostapd. To use the 5 GHz band, you can change the operations mode from hw_mode=g to hw_mode=a. Possible values for hw_mode are: a = IEEE 802.11a (5 GHz) (Raspberry Pi 3B+ onwards)
Can a Raspberry Pi 3 be a WiFi router?
In this article I’ll present how I used a Raspberry Pi 3 to create a Wifi access point. The specificity of my setup, is that the Raspberry won’t be a router but a bridge. DHCP is thus delegated to the main ADSL router and all devices connected to the AP will appear on the same network than other devices.
Can a WiFi access point be a router?
We are talking about an access point together with a wireless client connection on interface wlan0 to another wifi network (wlan repeater) or an internet router.
Why is wlan0 not configured in bridge BR0?
You may have noticed that wlan0 is not configured in bridge br0. This is because hostapd will handle this once the access point is ready. So, next step is to configure the access point. For this, edit the file /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf :
Can a Raspberry Pi connect to the Internet?
Now the Raspberry Pi is acting as an access point to which other devices can connect. However, those devices can’t use the Pi to access the internet just yet. To make the possible, we need to build a bridge that will pass all traffic between the wlan0 and eth0 interfaces. To build the bridge, let’s install one more package:
Is the interface AP @ wlan0 bound to the hostapd?
In this service the interface ap@wlan0 is created before starting hostapd. This is respected to the starting order. Because ap@wlan0 is bound to wlan0 it gets the same mac address. You may consider to give it a unique mac address but that’s not a good idea. On the network is only seen the mac address from wlan0.