Just going through the initial setup and it requires wired connection if you don’t have the PiFi official wifi dongle to complete the setup. I’m through that, and I installed the required drivers for my own wireless dongle through the Luci and the dongle is recognized and working.
Now the issue is making PiFi a working travel router. I can’t use the USB dongle as a client. The app says no dongle is installed when the 2.4G Network setting is tapped, just PiFi USB Required.
Is there any walkthrough to setting this up so that the built-in radio is the client and the USB dongle is the AP? Or vice versa?
The whole point of the app is to simplify setting up a travel router, but a wired connection isn’t how you would do that. I’m sure I could go in and edit settings through Luci or through manually editing the /etc/config/wireless and /etc/config/network files through ssh - but such a hassle negates the benefit of using PiFi altogether.
PiFi USB is optimised for access point through the software (using a pre-installed driver and a bunch of scripts) - every single USB adapter supported would need that software to be developed for it
I’m more than open to adding support in the app for other USB dongles, it’s just that there is generally very poor USB adapter driver support on OpenWrt (which may change as I believe the kernel is being updated soon) - so this may change at some date in the future
PiFi Kit solves the problem you are describing and with a USB 3.0 adapter with AC 1300Mbps performance and support both in firmware and the app
Other than that if you are using a third-party driver and third-party hardware then the software hasn’t been written for that so it is possible to configure via LuCI
Not sure I agree that it defeats the whole point since PiFi has an app for simple management of Wireguard, OpenVPN, AdGuard, NAS - you can certainly compare setup to vanilla OpenWrt, personally I find it a lot more complex.
So the options at the moment are PiFi Kit, which is optimised in both firmware and app. Or a third-party which would need to be configured in LuCI
The goal is this project isn’t particularly that it makes third-party adapters work brilliantly on OpenWrt, in fact the challenge of that is why we offer one
I have the CanaKit USB dongle. It looks a lot like your supported one and I thought it might work. RaLink chip. I thought just getting it to work with all required drivers would be enough. You are completely correct about many WiFi dongles not working with OpenWrt - I went through five before I found one that worked they way I wanted. I generally prefer the dongle to be the access point and the internal radio as the station.
Just wondering if you might be able to code in using the internal radio for wireless setup since it has both 5Ghz and 2.4Ghz capability. If a user didn’t have the supported dongle, the ethernet port would provide the LAN instead of the WAN - basically a wireless bridge travel router.
I really like your approach of using an IOS or Android app to configure it. That to me is the most important and valuable aspect of your project. A nice user friendly wrapper for OpenWrt setup and configuration would be a game changer. I’m imagining it being adapted to many different OpenWrt supported routers. It would be a huge hit and a boon to open source router firmware development.
The one wireless dongle I found that worked well in AP and Station mode was this one:
What chip is used in your AC 1300Mbps dongle? I’m wondering if I already have something in my collection that used the same internal hardware and might be recognized by PiFi.
I’ll follow up with some tips - it may not be possible with a third-party one for it to work in-app but I’ll send you over some tips shortly!
I want to try myself first (I have dozens of dongles here) - I don’t want to say a suggestion then waste your time if it’s not something that would have any benefit
If you did optimise your apps to configure routers using OpenWrt as the main engine, I can see it being adopted by a lot of manufacturers in their setup software. You can keep it open source so others can add layers of complexity of setups or license it if manufacturers show interest or even make a 99 cent app for people to buy. I like the concept very much and the potential is very high here.