Don’t forget your Pi

This month I found myself in the darkest depths of Cornwall. Well, not too far from the A39 to be honest, but deep and dark enough to have no phone signal, let alone the 4G I’ve become accustomed to. This was a working holiday (the blessing and curse of working for yourself). So Wi-Fi was a must when booking and the farm we planned to stay at assured us it was available, albeit shared between properties. Turns out this meant there was a small wooden ‘office’ at the end of the garden where the router sat. This could be visited when needed, making it the internet equivalent of an outside toilet.

Unfortunately, the router’s weedy Wi-Fi signal couldn’t penetrate the walls of the farmhouse we were in (which were thick enough to survive a nuclear blast). I had to come up with a plan if I wanted to avoid getting rained on every time I needed to read email (this was summer in England, after all) and avoid having the kids moan they couldn’t watch their favourite Minecraft YouTube videos.

Using a Raspberry Pi, an old USB Wi-Fi dongle, some spare Ethernet cables and a pair of those powerline adaptors, you buy when they’re on offer and never use, I got to work. After rereading man wpa_supplicant and with the dongle hanging out of an upstairs window (and the Pi secured in place with Blu-Tack) I was rewarded with glorious broadband (at rural speeds). The Pi performed admirably as a Wi-Fi bridge and router. The other residents may have laughed at my redneck network but I wasn’t the one schlepping down the garden, windows laptop tucked under my arm. None of this would have been possible without the Pi (and Linux) – it’ll be coming on holiday with me again. jolyon.brown@gmail.com