Access Point fallback for Orange pi 3 LTS with Armbian

[siparker]

Hi, 

I want to make my orange pi 3 lts work in a similar way to the way Wifi manager works on esp8266 projects

 

The idea being that if there is not a valid Wifi connection found then an AP is activated so a user can connect to a captive portal and enter the wifi ssid and password anc click connect. the pi then reboots and tries to connect. if that is successful then it works as normal if it is not then it reactivates the AP.

 

I found various different partial solutions but none of which seem to work well with my setup. this might be either due to the orange pi or Armbian.

 

The most promising i ahve foudn so far is https://github.com/balena-os/wifi-connect/ which is part of the Balena system. it is aimed at raspbian mainly but can install if you modify the installer argument which i found here https://github.com/balena-os/wifi-connect/issues/424

 

With this i can get the captive portal to run if i run it manually from ssh via ethernet and quickly unplug the ethernet port. However the captive portal does not seem to save the wifi credentials as it never connects to wifi afterwards. 

 

I also cannot get the wifi connect service to start using systemd which i tried following this guide https://planb.nicecupoftea.org/2019/01/11/balenas-wifi-connect-easy-wifi-for-raspberry-pis/ 

 

I am very new to armbian but am familiar with Linux generally. i am just looking for some pointers on what to modify / look for next to try and get this working.

 

i suppose the actual issue is i need a simple way for wifi credentials to be updated in an image i want to provide to our users. so any solution that being able to setup wifi credentials when there is no network access and specifically aimed at non techie type people.

 

 i see the following options.

1. AP Fallback capability like wifi connect or some other library/project that i haven't found yet. 

2. a way to use the raspberry pi imager which allows wifi and ssh info to be set when it is imaging. "unable to write to config.txt" indicates that in the raspberry pi images there is some sort of initial config file that then gets copied to the correct places on completion / first boot? is there anything that could be used with Armbian here?

3. some other solution to put wifi credentials into place directly from the SD card. I have seen quite a few posts back and forth regarding the use of a wpa_supplicant file i think it was removed? but not clear as lots of people still talk about this. and unlike a rpi image i cannot read an armbian imaged SD card via windows at all. 

 

Hope that makes sense and i appreciate your responses.

 

 

[Igor]

Another one to try https://raspap.com/

[siparker]

Thanks for the reply. 

 

I did look at raspap but it looks to be more suited to being an AP to share a connection and act as a full router versus just a fallback AP with captive portal if there is no wifi connection available. 

 

I just want a non techy friendly way to update a SSID and password via an AP. but ill take a look again and see if there is an option to do this here.