NAP documentation
The objective of this documentation is to set up two (or three) NAPs so they can connect devices of the same net wirelessly.
In our case we want to connect the Control Station, Vehicle and Booster. Although they all have different networks, they are connected wirelessly on the 192.168.0.0/24 network and then the RasPis have interfaces on both networks.
You will need a POE connector to supply power to the NAP. Connect the POE connector to power, then connect the data ethernet cable to your PC and the POE ethernet cable to the NAP.
You will need to set up a static address on your PC that matches the NAP.
If you want to reset the NAP, follow these steps:
- Disconnect the ethernet cable from the NAP to power it off.
- Press and hold the RESET button next to the ethernet port.
- Keep holding and connect the POE ethernet cable.
- Keep holding for ~5 seconds until you see a blinking light.
- Release the button and wait for the NAP to reset.
Download WinBox from the official page and open it. You should see the NAP with it's MAC and IP address. To enter the configuration screen, select it, write the password and connect. It's better to connect clicking the MAC address, as using the IP address sometimes doesn't work. By default the password is blank.
First, on the System section you can select Identity and Password to change the NAP's name and it's password.
First, we want to create a bridge that will connect the ethernet port with the wireless port. We do this by going to the Bridge section then clicking New. You should see a screen for creating the bridge with the default name bridge1. Don't change anything, just press OK to create it.
Stay on the Bridge section and click on the Ports screen. Here, create a new port. By default you should see the interface is ether1 and the bridge is bridge1. Click OK to create this port and then create another changing the interface to wlan1.
Head to Wireless -> Wireless. Here you should see the wlan1 interface, which is disbled by default. To change it, select it and click Enable, right next to the New button.
Before setting up the interface we need to create the security profile that they will use that to communicate with each other.
Stay on the Wireless section and click on the Security Profile screen then click New. You can give a name for the profile, we will just call it HyperNAP. Then, select mode dynamic keys, enable WPA2 PSK, and you can fill the password that the NAPs will use to connect with each other on WPA2 Pre-Shared Key. It's important that all NAPs have the same security profile.
Click OK to confirm the changes.
Now, head back to the WiFi interfaces section and open wlan1 to configure it by double-clicking it. There are a lot of sections, but we only want to change the *Wireless section.
First we want to change the mode to station bridge for the main NAP (control) or ap bridge for the rest (vehicle and Booster). With this the main NAP will emit the SSID and the other ones will connect to it.
Now, set the same SSID for all NAPs (in our case HyperNAP) and select the security profile we just created.
We will then configure the rest of the options according to our antenna. For example, for an antenna centered on 5.775 GHz with a big bandwidth we first select the country as etsi 5.7-5.8 srd, Band - 5GHz-only-AC, Channel Width - 20/40/80MHz XXXX and Frequency - 5775. Note that depending on the country there will be different frequency options.
At this point, if you have two different NAPs, one as station bridge and one as ap bridge, you should see traffic between them. You can chek this on the Interfaces section or on the Wireless section.
Finally, head to IP -> Addresses then create New. Here, select the IP address you want and select the bridge1 interface.
Note that the NAPs are configured to acte on the second layer, so they don't interact with IP. This IP address is only used to connect to the NAP via WinBox and configure it.
Because of this, we use IP addresses that don't interfere with the normal use of the net. In our case we used 192.168.0.101, 192.168.0.102 and 192.168.0.103.