balena-hotspot x RBPI 3B+

Product support
1

Hi all,

Been working on this for several days now, have viewed all the relevant threads on Balena Discourse and scoured Google for a NetworkManager solution that works.

I’m leveraging a Raspberry Pi 3B+ with balenaOS 2.47.0+rev1.

I create a file, balena-hotspot, and mount the file into the /system-connections/ directory. The files contents are as follows:

[connection]
id=balena-hotspot
uuid=36060c57-aebd-4ccf-aba4-ef75121b5f77
type=wifi
autoconnect=false
interface-name=wlan0
permissions=
secondaries=

[wifi]
band=bg
mac-address-blacklist=
mac-address-randomization=0
mode=ap
seen-bssids=
ssid=PLACE_SSID_HERE

[wifi-security]
group=
key-mgmt=wpa-psk
pairwise=
proto=rsn
psk=PLACE_YOUR_PASSWORD_HERE

[ipv4]
dns-search=
method=shared

[ipv6]
addr-gen-mode=stable-privacy
dns-search=
method=auto

I have messed with static IPs, changing the autoconnect, changing the band and many other settings.

I have set the WiFi Domain Registration as “country”:“US” in the config.json file.

Can someone tell me what I am doing wrong or provide a working balena-hotspot?

Any help is graciously appreciated.

3

Hey @dedline welcome to the forums!

Nothing is coming to mind yet but what would help is if you could let us know how far along you’re getting with this configuration. For example does the network access point actually come up, can you see it and join it? If you can give us a bit more info hopefully we can point you in the right direction.

We also have this project which creates a WiFi repeater using a Pi which may be of interest, as well: https://github.com/balenalabs-incubator/wifi-repeater

1 Like
5

@chrisys

When leveraging the balena-hotspot mounted to /system-configurations/, the network is not even discoverable.

That said, the wifi-repeater project solution you provided works flawlessly. It looks like I can add the security granularity via /src/nm.ts.

Bizzare. Any idea why balena-hotspot would not achieve the same result?

Thank you for your help!

8

Hi @dedline,

The issue you might be having is trying to bind mount the config file. Bind-mounting files to volumes won’t work here. As an alternative, you could edit the configuration file in the .img file before flashing it to a device. That would require you to loop mount the image, made your edits, and then use balenaEtcher (or similar) to flash the device.

You can test your configuration before doing the above by using the Host OS shell to manually edit the file (usually in /mnt/boot/system-configurations).

John