Many of us know the problem:
You don’t want your IOT Devices having internet access for obvious security concerns, but your ISP Router doesn’t support multiple Networks or blocking internet access. (Remember that cyberattacks are on the rise and IOT devices are often not well protected)
The best solution is of course to buy a new router, but this isn’t always feasible.
One theoretically possible solution would be to use the Wi-Fi antenna of the Raspberry Pi to create a new Wi-Fi Network (If you use Ethernet for your main connection). This way your devices can only communicate to your HA and are out of the reach for hackers, botnets etc.
What do you think about this idea? Is it even possible?
Just create VLAN’s and set firewall rules. If your not slavey doing that create guest account on router and connect all your IOT devices to that then you will have a firewall between your IOT devices and your main network. Most routers have the ability to do this.
If it is possible I suspect that the range would be poor and that the pi would quickly be overcome by the number of clients trying to connect.
Even home all in one box router / wifi modems only support about 20 to 30 clients.
If you are going to use wifi for iot you will eventually need to upgrade your wifi network to use distributed access points and a WLAN controller or mesh network.
Sadly my router doesn’t support VLAN. A guest network isn’t a good solution either because most routers block any connection between devices on the guest WIFI.
So the only possibility is to have home assistant and all the IOT devices on the main Network and my main devices on the guest WIFI. But then I can’t access my printer or home assistant locally.
I guess you’re right, this is a hanky solution at best, but for people living in an apartment without many IOT WiFi devices it could be a nice opAP might be ion.
From what I’ve heard the CPU of the Pi 4 is multiple times more powerful than than most APs, and it has shown to be able to handle amounts of traffic quite well (just look at all the VPN projects)
So the Pi has a stict limit to 5 devices, correct?