raspberry on a boat #3: Access point creation with dnsmasq and hostapd
Sailboats are expensive. If you own an older boat, it is mainly the accessories.
The Raspberry Pi mini computer is cheap and powerful. With some extra hardware, it can take over several tasks on a boat, like acting as a wireless access point, providing the plotter charts and software, collecting AIS information or multiplexing NMEA 0183 data.
This is part #3: Access point creation with dnsmasq and hostapd
In this part we will do a little digression: As planned during part #2 we want to define our Raspberry as an access point. So, this part might be interesting for non-sailers as well to use the Raspberry at home as an AP.
We will use dnsmasq to get DHCP+DNS server functionality and we use hostapd to offer WPA2 authentification on a pre-defined SSID.
Let's go!