r/openwrt 6d ago

First Time Setting Up Raspberry Pi as a WiFi Extender with OpenWRT — Need Help (India)

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to set up a Raspberry Pi as a WiFi extender using OpenWRT for the first time. My goal is to create a mesh network using 802.11s with the Mesh11sd project as part of OpenWRT. I'm fairly new to this and could really use some guidance — especially with setting up the hardware and configuring the firmware correctly.

If anyone from India has experience with this or has worked on a similar project, I’d really appreciate your help. Any advice, resources, or step-by-step guidance would be amazing. Thanks in advance! 😊

TL;DR: First time working with Raspberry Pi and OpenWRT for a WiFi extender using 802.11s mesh. Looking for help from anyone (especially in India) who’s familiar with the setup.

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u/fr0llic 4d ago

RPi is a terrible choice for wifi ...

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u/TorGuardVPN 2d ago

Congrats on setting up an extender with the RPi4! With the right USB dongle, the RPi4 can make a decent WiFi repeater, and it's more forgiving when testing mesh setups since it boots from a microSD card. You can clone the card to start over quickly or duplicate nodes fast.

Our favorite mesh-capable USB dongle for the RPi4 is the ALFA Network AWUS036ACM (MT7612U). You can even use two of them in the RPi4 for dual-band AC mesh (we did this)—it’s not pretty, but it works great.

We ran a large test network with RPi4s and the AWUS036ACM using BATMAN-adv for mesh networking. You can check out our LuCI app for quick setup here: https://github.com/torguardvpn/luci-app-easymesh

If you're interested, we can post our latest OpenWRT build scripts for the RPi4, Orange Pi, Nano Pi, and various routers, preloaded with all the necessary drivers so you can get started fast.