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I am trying to make a wifi repeater. My router's signals don't come to my study and instead of buying a proper wifi repeater I prefer making one.

I want to learn how to make a simple wifi repeater that:

  • repeats/boosts my existing home wifi network by connecting to it.
  • Has some kind of a GUI or something that allows me to connect to it first (from some smartphone or PC) to configure it to my home network. It should find and show wifi networks around and then connect to the one I want it to upon my command.

I am new to electronics. Arduino is my preferred platform. If there are other easy to do alternatives that shall work too.

Any kind of help will be appreciated...tutorials, blogs, etc.

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    "Arduino is my preferred platform." Not for a wifi repeater it isn't.
    – Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams
    Commented Mar 9, 2015 at 6:11
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    Get a router that support OpenWRT. That way you can still "hack" the unit.
    – Gerben
    Commented Mar 9, 2015 at 11:25
  • You can do three things: 1) cheapest and can use arduino 2) use a SBC (raspberry pi or derivatives) 3) hackable router. Solution 1 is to buy a cheap wifi repeater and, if you want an arduino, glue it to the front or back. Ta-da! Arduino wifi repeater... Jokes apart, the other solutions are serious. Using an SBC (like raspberry pi, or I found orange pis to be quite good) and two wifi adapters (or sometimes only one, but depends on the adapter - or if the SBC has one onboard) you can make a repeater. You will have to do all the work, starting from a bare linux environment, or use a ...continue
    – frarugi87
    Commented Feb 9, 2017 at 8:31
  • common distribution for routers (e.g. openwrt or ddwrt) to have almost all of its job done. Maybe the throughput won't be the maximum one, but you will have a simple and cheap solution. The alternative is to buy a router which already have openwrt or ddwrt ready for them. Look at the distribution's help pages to find a list of supported devices. Usually they are more expensive than generic routers, but YMMV...
    – frarugi87
    Commented Feb 9, 2017 at 8:34

3 Answers 3

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An arduino wifi repeater would in theory be very slow. Since you need to record the bit stream to the internal memory, then switch the spi to the transmitter, and send the bit stream, im unsure about what would happen if you miss a few bits in the process.

Arduino Wifi Shield - the price of a wifi shield 85 usd

Wifi repeater ebay the price of a wifi repeater 22 usd.

This makes me question why one would go through the troubble of making a wifi repeater of an arduino.

Even investing in a raspberry pi and a wifi dongle would be less expensive.

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  • Indeed - lots of people have bought cheap wifi access points to hack as wifi interfaces for their arduinos, because at points in recent history you have been able to get an entire wifi router for less than the cost of a wifi shield.
    – Chris Stratton
    Commented Mar 9, 2015 at 14:19
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Get a very cheap module called ESP8266, particularly the ESP-01, then flash a program called esp_wifi_repeater (which uses the arduino IDE)

https://github.com/martin-ger/esp_wifi_repeater

I have tested it several times it is pretty fast and with a ESP to USB adapter it steps down 5vdc from USB to it's usable 3.3v of the module

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  • Would you need 2 ESP8266 for a repeater? The ESP8266 only appears to have 1 antenna.
    – John Spence
    Commented Feb 15, 2020 at 10:58
  • I tried flashing this on my esp8266 esp-015 and it wouldnt work for some reason. I got the binaries from the git repo and everything. No clue why it wont start
    – Leonardo Wildt
    Commented Feb 20, 2020 at 18:51
  • At this very moment, I'm making a repeater with an ESP01 and it's working great for IoT purposes. I've seen folks on Github saying it would have speed issues for regular browsing but didn't test this myself. @Leonardo, I only managed to flash my chips using esptool.py with -fs detect and -fm dout
    – brasofilo
    Commented Mar 20, 2020 at 16:44
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the network parts are "owned"by the yun side of the board. the yun acts like a mini linux pc, who can seperatly connect trough a bridge library to the arduino. so.. i think you could do it or make it a router that would probaply be easier, but this all wouldnt depend on arduino code, more depend on if there are WRT packages who can do this.. i thinks they should exist as this linux variant is in other routers too.

(better route then repeat btw, repeats puts delays on your entire lan)

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