Openhabian on RPi3 - enable Wi-Fi access point parallel to LAN?

Setup, Configuration and Use Installation
1

Hi. I’'m using Openhabian on RPI3 Server for quite a while. My network setup is as follows:
behind home internet Firewall which provides home ethernet/WLAN I have another router, which is connected with WAN port to my home ethernet network. This router serves separate WLAN with is used solely for my OH system - Shellies, Sonoff and Home Control Touchpanels (all via MQTT broker, located on OH). Rpi/Openhabian is connected to this router via wired Ethernet port.

Now I have an Idea - what if I plug my RPI to my home ethernet directly and enable Wi-Fi access point on it, so that Shellies and Sonoffs would connect to RPI instead of router and RPI would serve as a router for them?
Should work, right? The only question - does Openhabian have a setup for it, or does anyone already tried the steps to activate Wi-FI in AP mode on RPI3 parallel to Opehabian? Did it work?

Thanks

2

No openHABian does not support doing this. It’s working on the basic assumption that it’s an endpoint, not a router, and you should not work against that. Many pitfalls looming.

3

Thanks. Is it possible to do with standard OH installation?

4

Standard OH has no OS so it’s up to you.
I wouldn’t do it anyway. It’s architecturally unclean and has potential for hard to find errors.

5

Yeah, I know that maintainers see the one and only architecture as the right one :slight_smile:

But in my case this will save a piece of hardware, which will make my hardware architecture much cleaner and allow full redundancy in my system.

I will give it a try.

6

You are of course free to do anything on any OS of yours.
But for developing and maintaining a platform - which is what openHABian is -, a well defined architecture is a prerequisite.

If by this statement you mean to do it on top of openHABian then mind this will apply.

7

Well, I don’t see any reason why this feature can’t become a part of Openhabian architecture some day.

Actually I’m even a bit surprised that it’s not a part of platform already: nowadays more and more smart home devices communicate over Wi-Fi and people might want to put them all into dedicated WLAN serving only for smart home functionality in order not to interfere with other devices.

RPi offers Wi-Fi AP option, so it’s could serve both as Openhabian server and AP for Wi-Fi smart home devices. If people want so. I’m not saying this should be a default feature, but an option, like it is with Node-RED for example.

8

There has been little to no interest in this.
Because it’s simple to individually configure a box to do stuff but A LOT harder to change a platform to auto-configure a box to do it.

The nature of adding a feature to a platform is that doing so must not interfere with any existing functionality.
Noone so far has been willing to spend his time on implementing and testing this.

If you come up with a PR that is well tested to not interfere with any of the existing functionality, I’ll consider adding it.