(#38) RV Phone Home

Making Connections

Part of the problem with a Computerized and Connected RV is the connected part. The promised ubiquity of wireless connectivity is still plagued with holes. Holes in coverage. 

What good is an RV loaded with Raspberry Pis doing their automation-thing if they can’t communicate with the outside world?

That’s a rhetorical question. The answer is “Not much”, of course.

Making A Connection

There are a gazillion (or thereabouts) commercial solutions to this. You’ve undoubtedly have a solution in your home. It’s called a WiFi Router. One end of the router has a cable that plugs into “The Internet”. The other end of the router has WiFi antennas that you can connect your computer(s) to.

The RV makes things a little more interesting. First there’s rarely a way to plug a “cable” into The Internet. Moreso if you’re rolling down the road; very hard to keep that wired connection to the Internet. RV owners sometimes invest in WiFi Extenders, or WiFi Repeaters to solve this.

One end of the WiFi Repeater connects, wirelessly, to another WiFi Router that, in turn, is wired to the Internet. For example, if you’re parked next to a Starbucks, your WiFi Repeater would work something like this:

 

Bob’s your uncle – your RV (and the computers inside) are connected to the Internet.

You can buy a WiFi Repeater.

And frankly you probably should.

It’ll be less work and less reading.

However, if you’re like me, and don’t want to pop $300 for something that should be $50, then you decide to roll your own.

Rolling your Own WiFi Repeater

You might be lucky enough to have an old, unused but still functional router lying around in the house. I did. Obviously, or this blog post would end right here.

I had a Netgear N750 (Model WNDR4300) going unused. This model has a couple of things going for it that’ll make it ideal to turn it into a WiFi Repeater:

1. There are two antennas in the router – one for the 2.4GHz band and the other for 5GHz
2. This router can run the OpenWRT firmware

Google up OpenWRT if you’re curious but it’s free and open software that will replace the Netgear software and unlock the full potential of your router.

There’s NO WAY I’m going to cover off installing OpenWRT.

Nope. If you mess it up, you could brick your router.

“Bricking” is where you screw up and render the router unusable. Turning it into an expensive “brick”.

No. Figure out how to install OpenWRT on your router if you wish.

The come back here.

If you wish.

 

Getting to the WiFi Repeating Part

OpenWRT makes it easy to turn the N750 into a wireless repeater.

What’s great about the N750 are the two wireless bands: 5GHz and 2.4GHz. You can use one band to “connect to Starbucks and out the internet” and use the other band to connect the computers in the motorhome.

I’ll quickly gloss over the steps to get things all connected, but briefly:

- in the OpenWRT setup screens you select the 5GHz radio and tell it to scan for WiFi networks.

- you pick the wireless WiFi network you want to join (e.g. Starbucks), type in the password for that network and click “Join”.

- you then flip over to the 2.4GHz radio setup screens and make it into an Access Point. This is very easy, and only needs to be done once. Give it a new SSID (it’s ‘OpenWRT’) by default. Make it password protected

Finally, For each RPi in the RV, you have it join the 2.4GHz network. And test that each Rpi can access the internet.

 

In the End

We’ve reused and old router and effectively created our own WiFi Wanderer, WiFi Explorer, WiFi Arranger. You get the drift.

In a subsequent post, I’ll cover off the OpenWRT setup in more detail. But rest assured, it’s not hard.

No, no I won't.  Because...