Fully Standalone Gateway Operation

WebThings
#1

In my planned use case, I want to be able to operate a WebThings Gateway in a remote location without WiFi. Configuring the gateway in my office using one of my development routers works fine on an RPi 3 B+. My target system consists of several Z-Wave devices and appropriate rules connected via a UZB stick. When I power down the WiFi router used to configure the gateway and re-boot to simulate remote operation, the Pi 3 configuration comes up albeit slowly because of all the network retries during the WiFi setup. The system works as intended but I am unable to access the gateway dashboard to check the status of the devices (e.g. battery level of the motion sensors). If I bring the router back up, the gateway reconnects and the dashboard can be reached as it was during setup.

Am I doing something wrong in my setup or this the expected behavior? From I can discern from the code, it doesn’t appear that the gateway dashboard is meant to be reached via the gateway-configured AP but I may be missing something. It does seem to me that operating the system as a fully self-contained router and gateway controller is a good idea. The Turris Omnia OpenWrt approach probably solves this problem but it’s far too expensive for my use case and apparently not yet available in the U.S… A Raspberry Pi Gateway/OpenWrt configuration seems an ideal path to a fully standalone gateway.

Thanks. Any help would be appreciated.

#2

Another option would be to pre-configure an AP on the Pi and have the gateway code use that IP address as the configured WiFi. As best as I can tell from the code, it might work as long as ‘wifiskip’ isn’t set. I know the comments specifically state to not to enable hostapd but I haven’t drilled down into the router setup code too much to see where the impact is. Thoughts?

#3

Hi Gary,

It’s possible to create an OpenWrt build for the RPi, so that it can act like an access point. Or you can buy a cheap travel router, since my experience is that they normally work better than an RPi (in terms of serving Wi-Fi clients). GL.inet has cheap and easy-to-config travel routers. Do you plan to connect to the RPi wirelessly? If it is not connected to any other LAN/WLAN, then it will indeed need to host its own local network.

#4

Thanks, Kathy. A good idea. My development router is actually a GL.inet AR150. It’s an interesting alternative. It adds to the cost but it would enable me to use a Pi Zero W for the Gateway in conjunction with the GL.inet router. I doubt if OpenWrt would work well on a Pi Zero. The minimum for that Gateway+OpenWrt is probably a Pi 3 B+.

Any thoughts about my idea of pre-configuring an AP with hostapd on the RPi that starts before the Gateway might work? I don’t need all the functionality of Open/Wrt and this would basically create a network that should show up on the list as a Wi-Fi alternative for configuration. I have been digging through the code a bit and it almost seems that it should work but I am no doubt missing something important. Lots of code to parse. It might be an interesting experiment for tomorrow.

#5

We had built an OpenWrt image for the RPi, but we decided that the provisioning process was cumbersome and might confuse people. And the RPi doesn’t provide good quality Wi-Fi connectivity, and only supports a limited number of clients. :frowning:
@dhylands may be able to provide pointers if you want to make an image for RPi that acts like an AP/router. But in my experience, the cheap AP/router + RPi IoT hub is a more stable and useful solution. But of course that’s for my needs…