Is there a way to use the RPi as a WiFi bridge?

Hi
In my setup, my ISP provided hub/router is in the living room next to my TV/Amp.

I have WiFi power strips around my apartment and it all works fine with a decent enough signal strength until I watch TV and then the WiFi power strips in my spare room/office disconnect from HA.

My office is ethernet connected and it’s how I connect the HA RPi, so I was wondering if there’s a way to repurpose the RPi 's built in WiFi to act as a bridge to the main hub’s WiFi signal?

Have any of you used your RPi to extend your WiFi to other rooms?
If so, were you able to set it up as a bridge connection (not an access point)?

Research OpenWRT.
Meanwhile, Netgear R7000 routers can be had for low prices on eBay or OfferUP and work well as both wifi and ethernet connected access points.
Or, buy $500 of mesh networked thingees.

Hi
Thanks for the suggestions

I’m running out of wall sockets, so I’m trying to re-use what I have rather than buying more stuff if I can :slight_smile: From what I’ve seen so far, the HASS operating system is fairly locked down, even with SSH Protection off, so I don’t think I’d be able to configure OpenWRT outside of the UI.

I did look into the Hass.io Access Point add-on which looked very promising. I think it’s 95% of the way there, but I wasn’t able to configure it to work as a bridge, only an access point.

While trying to get that to work as a bridge I managed to lose HA on the network. In the end I had to use the CLI to restore a backup after HA wasn’t discoverable on the LAN any more.

Before I messed it up beyond recovery, I figured I should ask if anyone else has managed to successfully configure one as a bridge :slight_smile:

Looking at the Access Point github page, it looks like AP should work as a bridge, but it may not be working on the current release.

I’ll move my question over to there :+1:

Have a look at this: https://raspap.com/

I’m fairly sure you can’t use the same raspberry as the one you use for HA.
But if your problem is that you are running out of wall sockets then add a fe or use a power strip?
I really don’t see that as an issue.

There are extenders that send the network connection through the power lines but I have never seen any that works good enough.
But that could be an option if the issue is wall sockets since I believe there models that can pass through the mains voltage.
At least I think I remember seeing some versions that work that way.

I fear you’ve picked the wrong hobby with Home Asssistant, it continuously urges me to buy more stuff :rofl: But it is a worthy cause.

I strongly believe that your routers location(or re-location) is something you should consider
EDIT: Just to emphasize :wink:

https://rushnetworkings.com/can-a-router-interfere-with-tv/

Adding even more wifi is not a solution to wifi interference problems. It’s only going to make it worse. As had been said above, first (free) step is to relocate your router. Are you watching TV over wifi ? If so, try to connect your TV over Ethernet instead. The best long term solution is to disable wifi on your ISP issued modem/router and buy a better quality dedicated wifi router instead. It doesn’t have to be some outrageously overpriced Ubiqui stuff or similar, Netgear makes some great reasonably priced gear too.

1 Like

+1 to what @HeyImAlex is saying: WiFi is a shared medium, adding devices makes it worse.

I really wonder if WiFi is a good way to go for a reliable system with a standard modem/router from your provider.

That RushNetworkings acrticle is just mostly a bunch of nonsense.
The advices are seomwhat correct, but the explainations are mostly wrong, which can make it hard to act correctly on.

The first advice have already been given.
Try to relocate your wifi router and do not hide it away.

There are sort of three things that stops a wifi signal.

EM (electro-magnetic) interference, which is noise any electric equipment make. There are rules for how much a device can make and it what frequency spectrums, but it will always be there and the closer you get to the source the more powerful the EM will be. A TV generate a lot of EM, so keep the router away from that, but other equipment does it too. Many microwave ovens generate EM in the 2.4Ghz frequency spectrum.
These are examples of unintentionel EM noise sources, but there are also intentionel EM noise sources. 2.4Ghz is an open frequency spectrum, so other equipment not related to wifi can use it too and wireless DECT phones, wireless doorbells, remote controlled cars and alot of other remote controlled/wireless gear use this frequency spectrum and not all are that polite in the usage.
All this other gear can really saturate the frequency spectrum at times and that is why the 5Ghz frequency spectrum is released for wifi. The 5Ghz frequency spectrum is much more limited in the allowed usage, so a full saturation is less likely to occur, but not all wifi devices support this frequency.

Solids is the second thing that limits radio signals, but it is a wide spread.
Paper is hardly a limitation at all, wood is blocking just a slight and brick a bit more, metal is the worst, since it blocks totally. Concrete is like brick, but its usually reinforced with steel that is a metal.
Solids are a bit special though, because it does not actually absorb the signal, but instead bounce it, so a metal skeleton in a concrete building can often still be penetrated, because the signal can find a way to bounce through the metal bars. It will lose some strength but often come through.
If you have your wifi router behind the TV and the backplate is a large one-piece metal sheet, then it will be hard to bounce around it though.
Be aware here that 5Ghz actually have a harder time bouncing around, due to the higher frequency.

Liquids are the last really bad limitation for radio signals. like wifi, and most people do not realize how much liquid stuff there actually is around them.
Water cooler, water pipes and toilets are logical things with water, but these are also usually cover in metal and therefore hit by the solid limitations.
But plants also contain water and windows are also actually liquids.
The newer 3 layered thermo windows are practically impossible to get a radio signal through.
And with plants then its also worth noticing that the plants change with season, especially if its outdoor plants. In the winter the plants withdraw the sap from the leafs and store it in the roots and stem, which makes it easier to get a radio signal through, but come summer and the plants will start to grow leafs and fill them with sap and its suddenly a much larger obstacle for the radio signal.

Now you have an idea on what can interfere with your wifi signal and that can make it easier to place your wifi router.
If you have an Android phone, then I can recommend WIFI Analyzer to check how the frequency spectrum looks and see what signal strength you get from your AP locations when you stand in different spots in your home.

If you can not find a suitable place for your router, then the solution is not a new router, because routers are limited by laws on what signal strength they can emit and that is something even a cheap router can achieve.
The correct way is to actually expand your wifi with another wired access point.

If you choose to expand your wifi with another access point then there is a few things to know.
First you need to make sure that your current wifi router can be set to a fixed frequency for the wifi.

The 2.4Ghz frequency spectrum is divided into 11 (some places 13) bands, which fits the 802.11b wifi standard providing 11mb/s speeds, but most routers today will at least use the 802.11g wifi standard providing 54mb/s and that standard actually combine 7 bands.
To accomodate the 7 bands in 802.11g the normally accepted bands for usage is then limited to 1,6 and 11 (maybe 13 in some areas).
Band 1 will then use -2 to 4 (no idea why it is allowed to go outside the frequency limits, but it does)
Band 6 will use 3 to 9 and band 11 will use 8 to 14.
The 802.11n standard is a bit more tricky, but it is most likely not really used here, since just one device using 802.11b or 802.11g will pull limit the entire wifi to the slower speeds.

You need to be able to select that your routers wifi will use one of those bands and stick to it.
Once you can achieve that then buy another access point (a wifi router is possible, if you can disable nat and dhcp, but it still requires a little fiddling, so a pure access point is better).
Now make a wired connection to the new access point in the area where you old wifi router does not cover and set up the new access point with the same settings (ssid, password, 802.11 standards) as the old wifi router, although with another frequency (best frequencies will be 1 and 11 if there are no other usage in them).

With this setup devices will connect to the most powerful point and because devices usually try to cling to that device, then you will not much jumping around.
If a jump occur, then you will get a short disconnect, but the device should connect automatically and continue its sessions.
This will mostly be devices you carry around, like your mobile phone, but once it occur is at the point where it would most likely loose the connection completely in the old setup.

This expanding of the wifi can generally occur when there is still room for it in the frequency spectrum, so with the 802.11g standard you can put an access point on band 1, 6 and 11, but after that it becomes much harder, because the next one you add will have to be placed so its range does not overlap with other access points. If there is an overlap, then the access points will start to saturated each other and the end result is poorer wifi.

The general advice is, like some here have pointed out, move as much as possible to wired connections. They are faster, more resilliant to noise and free up the wifi for the stuff that can only use that.

lol , yes thou both are VERY basic/for beginners level … and as the OP’s initial description seems indicate

I can’t help thinking about, move the d… router, or stop watching tv, while using the light-strip in the office
and i didn’t find it more convenient, to write yet another essay in regards to wifi disturbance, as there a quit a few, in here and everywhere, which a simple google search will reveal.
Beside starting to suggest to buy additional, or new router etc. is not my first thought

PS: i think im pretty sure you didn’t write yet another essay, as it seems very likely a copy/paste from another site i’ve seen( thou without reference to the source )

I actually wrote that from the ground up.
It did not take that long though. :slight_smile:

ok, admittedly it does cover most things people could/should take in consideration, or atleast be aware of … specially before they get too annoyed by “stuff/apps/network” being slow , or as in this case, loss of connection

Wifi is just a hard subject to handle, because it is not just wifi.
Wifi is like a highway where we move our data, but people often to not consider that some wireless door bell can act like a dog walker crossing the road with no regards to our travel or a DECT phone that suddenly creates a child birthday party with attached playground right across 5 lanes.

1 Like

Not to mentioned the cool new ax-router that have to stream to the “old” WIFI.g TV interface, … there goes that performance boost, atleast the WiFi-cpu doesn’t get overheated on the Router

Yeah, it is all good in theory.
Reality is something completely different! :thinking:

Uhm no. Of course a cheap router can blast RF at +30dBm. But that doesn’t mean it will give you good connectivity. There are so many more factors besides tx power. Antenna quality (antenna gain can increase the legal tx limits by up to +23 dBm, afair), rx noise levels and signal discrimination, filtering and noise rejection. That’s what makes the difference between a wifi AP being able to operate in a noisy RF environment and one that cannot. Add to that the software side of things, quality of the wifi stack, the way it can handle congested bands (or not), the way it can deal with devices that are continuously streaming (tv, security cam), etc etc.

Getting a quality router to replace the (usually garbage) ISP issued one will absolutely make a difference.

It’s the right solution only if you have coverage issues (the OP doesn’t). In all other cases, doing this will just spam the 2.4GHz band more. People just throwing in more APs as the universal solution whenever they have wifi connectivity issues in this uber-congested band is the main reason it is congested to begin with, at least in densely populated areas.

DECT does not use the 2.4GHz spectrum. It has it’s own dedicated band in the 1.8-1.9 GHz region, depending on the country.

Very true, past years some(if not most) ISP found another “post” to reduce costs, as most people don’t have the knowledge and interest, and the majority find it “better” because their old router they had was “old”, sadly because these ISP also have this “included” in their pries( rent or payed over certain years ), and people just have to pay, whether they use it or not.

That might be possible in the US. EU law state that the output has to be measured at the transmitter output and not at the antenna, so changing the antenna will only improve the RX features.
Antenna gain on the TX side is not possible.
In the past there have been wifi devices with the ability to unlock this limitation, but it was definately not common and EU have cracked down on that loophole (and are currently about to go totally crazy: EU Radio Lockdown Directive - FSFE).

It is correct that the RX side can be improved, but with IoT stuff its mostly their TX side that have issues due to poor transmitting power, because the chip is made to be able to run on batteries too.

Besides if you compare most wifi devices today, then many of them actually have the same set of RF chips. The true difference is in the CPU and RAM, which makes the better devices able to do faster swtiching, more firewall rules, handle VPN services and so on. The fast switching is just not a reality in many networks, since you need to get all devices up to newer standards, like 802.11n, 802.11ax and so on. Having just one device running 802.11b/g or 802.11a will activate the fallback compatibility mode and severely limit the speed and the need for the faster switching.
Most IoT devices is sadly 802.11b/g.

I adviced him to find another spot and if there were no spots covering all areas, then expand.
A more expensive wifi router might improve it just a bit, but rarely enough to matter.
An extra, and pure, access point is often a lot cheaper, since you do not need to pay for a big cpu to handle switching, nat’ing, firewall and maybe even VPN, and the effect will be many times better than the router upgrade.
But yes, the extra AP will add to the saturation of the frequency spectrum in general, but placing them at the right channel bands will make sure that the saturation will not affect himself that much.
The big issues first really come when you add extra access points and some of them need to overlap in the channel bands, then you need expensive equipment, like a Cisco access points that can measure neighboring access points at the same time as the work as normal access points and you need that processed with something like a Cisco 2504 wireless controller.

Somewhat true.
The DECT standard is made to use those dedicated band but around the time of the first GSM mobile phone the production costs of the DECT phones fell drastically.
Many manufactors could now make cheap DECT phones for the common man and price became the selling point.
The 1.8-1.9 GHz region required a certification and that could double the price on a DECT phone, but using the 2.4 GHz region instead this certification price could be cut.
There are still quite a few of these 2.4 GHz phones out there, though the electronics are dying out.
If you look at the description of the DECT standards, then the 2.4GHz region is barely mentioned, but it is there.

Like in the Wikipedia

the DECT physical layer specifies RF carriers for the frequency ranges 1880 MHz to 1980 MHz and 2010 MHz to 2025 MHz, as well as 902 MHz to 928 MHz and 2400 MHz to 2483,5 MHz ISM band