Humble - Raspberry Pi WiFi network link conditioner

Connect your Raspberry Pi4 with your router turn on the Pi and join your new configurable WiFi network named humble. Access your Raspberry Pi4 through HTTP and choose the WiFi speed like this:

Table of Contents

• Background
• Prerequisite
• Install using the pre-made image
  • Log into the device
  • Changing WiFi password
  • Changing SSH login password
  • Use a USB WiFi antenna
  • Raspberry Pi image setup
  • Change WiFi geographical location
  • Turn on auto update for the Throttle front end
• Install from scratch
  • Install the OS and prepare your device
  • Enable WiFi
  • Install and setup
  • Install throttle frontend
• Change throttling using the API
• Take a copy of your SD card

Background

Inspired by Sam Smiths PiNC I wanted to make a easy way for everyone (not just developers) to try out different internet speeds.

Prerequisite

You need a Raspberry Pi 4 with a Ethernet cable that you can connect to your router.

Install using the pre-made image

1. Download the pre-made image from releases.
2. Burn the image on a SD card using Raspberry Pi Imager.
3. Insert the SD card into the Raspberry Pi 4.
4. Connect your Raspberry Pi with your router through a Ethernet cable and turn on your Raspberry Pi.
5. Join your new configurable humble WiFi network on desktop or mobile phone with the password goslowtogoFAST.
6. Access your Raspberry Pi through HTTP and chose the WiFi speed. On Mac access http://raspberrypi.local:3001 from your web browser. On other OS you can use nmap to find your Raspberry IP address. Access that IP using port 3001 in your browser.
7. Choose the WiFi speed.

When you checked that everything works you should change the WiFi password and the SSH password!

Log into the device

Use the user pi and password myloveisyourloveforever to log into the device using SSH.

Changing WiFi password

Edit the file /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf and change the password to your new password.

sudo nano /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf

Reboot by sudo reboot.

Changing SSH login password

Login to the device and change the password to your new password using passwd.

Use a USB WiFi antenna

If you want to use your humble installation for performance testing you probably want to use a USB WiFi antenna that is better than the default one that comes with the Raspberry Pi.

The new WiFi will probably be wan1 on your Raspberry and that means you need to reconfigure your Pi so its used:

1. Edit /etc/dhcpcd.conf with sudo nano /etc/dhcpcd.conf and change wan0 to wan1.
2. Edit /etc/dnsmasq.conf with sudo nano /etc/dnsmasq.conf and change wan0 to wan1.
3. Edit /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf with sudo nano /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf and change wan0 to wan1.
4. Reboot by sudo reboot.

---

If you use another antenna you need to make sure that the WiFI do not go to sleep mode. You can check your setup with iwcofig and look for the power option for you WiFi.

To turnoff sleeping mode you can run:

sudo iw wlan1 set power_save off

And for turning it off for startup you need to edit:

sudo nano /etc/rc.local

Then before exit 0 add the following line: /sbin/iwconfig wlan1 power off

Raspberry Pi image setup

The image (based on Raspberry Pi OS Lite) has the following extra setup:

• It runs unattended-upgrades to keep the image up to date.
• It runs fail2ban
• It starts the web version of throttle on startup using systemd.

Change WiFi geographical location

The WiFi setup in the images has Sweden as geographical setup and you probably want to change that. Use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1 to find your country code. I'm located in Sweden so I use SE.

You need to change in two different places. First run:

sudo raspi-config nonint do_wifi_country SE

And then edit the file /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf and change the current country code to yours.

sudo nano /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf

And change the row:

country_code=SE

Then reboot by sudo reboot.

Turn on auto update for the Throttle front end

You can make sure user interface is automatically updated by adding the following in the crontab.

First open the crontab:

crontab -e

And then add the following lines:

0 6 * * *  bash -lc /home/pi/update.sh  2>&1 | logger -t humble-updates

Install from scratch

Thank you SpaceRex for your tutorial Turn your Raspberry Pi into a WiFi Router!, that helped me a lot to set this up! Checkout the video for more details.

Install the OS and prepare your device

1. Download and install the latest Raspberry Pi OS Lite image to a SD card using Raspberry Pi Imager.
2. Add an empty file named SSH to root section of the SD card so you more easily can access the Raspberry Pi.
3. Insert the SD card into the Raspberry Pi, connect your Raspberry Pi with your router through a Ethernet cable and turn on your Raspberry Pi.
4. Find the IP number of your Raspberry Pi, use nmap to find your Raspberry IP address or on Mac just use raspberrypi.local.
5. Login to your Raspberry using SSH (this example if for Mac): SSH [email protected] with password raspberry.
6. Once you logged in, change the password for the pi user using passwd to set a new password.

Now you are ready to turn your Raspberry Pi into a WiFi router.

Enable WiFi

1. By default the WiFI on the Raspberry Pi is disabled (you will get a message like Wi-Fi is currently blocked by rfkill. when you login to the device). Enable the WiFi by setting your geographical location. Use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1 to find the country code. I'm located in Sweden so I use SE.

First run:

sudo raspi-config nonint do_wifi_country SE

Then reboot the device:

sudo reboot

Install and setup

1. First make sure to update: sudo apt update
2. Install the following so your Raspberry Pi can act as a router: sudo DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt install -y hostapd dnsmasq netfilter-persistent iptables-persistent
3. Make sure it starts on boot:

sudo systemctl unmask hostapd.service
sudo systemctl enable hostapd.service

4. Edit etc/dhcpcd.conf and make sure to add the interface at the bottom of the file and set the subnet that is gonna be used (make sure you don't use that IP before on your network). This makes sure that when wlan0 is used (our WiFi) the Raspberry Pi get IP 10.2.1.1:

sudo nano /etc/dhcpcd.conf

Then add at the bottom of the file:

interface wlan0
    static ip_address=10.20.1.1/24
    nohook wpa_supplicant

5. Then edit /etc/sysctl.d/routed-ap.conf to forward ipv4 adresses.

Open the file:

sudo nano /etc/sysctl.d/routed-ap.conf

and add net.ipv4.ip_forward=1 in that file.

6. Tell the traffic where to go. In the terminal run:

sudo iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE
sudo netfilter-persistent save

7. The step prepare your Raspberry to be a router and setup which IP addresses devices will have when they connect. That happens on /etc/dnsmasq.conf.

As a first step, move the old version so we have a backup:

sudo mv /etc/dnsmasq.conf /etc/dnsmasq.conf.old

Then open (a new) file: sudo nano /etc/dnsmasq.conf

And add the following lines:

interface=wlan0
dhcp-range=10.20.1.5,10.20.1.100,255.255.255.0,72h
domain=wlan
address=/rt.wlan/10.20.1.1

8. Setup your host access point file. Edit /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf Here you need to add your country code again (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1) and set a password (wpa_passphrase) and a name ssid of your WiFi network.

Open the file:

sudo nano /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf

And then add:

country_code=SE
interface=wlan0
ssid=humble
hw_mode=a
channel=36
macaddr_acl=0
auth_algs=1
ignore_broadcast_ssid=0
wpa=2
wpa_passphrase=goslowtogoFAST    
wpa_key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
wpa_pairwise=TKIP
rsn_pairwise=CCMP

Change the country_code to your country code.

It's also in this configuration file you choose what frequency your WiFi network will be on.
hw_modecan be either a = 5GHz, b = 2.4Ghz or g =2.4 GHz.

9. Make sure your WiFI has power save turned off (Power Management:off). First check that power saving is turned on by running iwcofig. If it's on, you can make sure that is turned off on startup by:

sudo nano /etc/rc.local

Then before exit 0 add the following line: /sbin/iwconfig wlan0 power off

10. The WiFI setup is done. Reboot your Pi sudo reboot and try to connect to your WiFi network on your desktop or mobile.

Install throttle frontend

To be able to run the frontend you need to install NodeJS. Install latest LTS, when I write this that version is 16.13.1.

wget https://nodejs.org/dist/v16.13.1/node-v16.13.1-linux-armv7l.tar.xz
tar xf node-v16.13.1-linux-armv7l.tar.xz
cd node-v16.13.1-linux-armv7l/
sudo cp -R * /usr/local/

Then you can verify that it worked by running:

node --version

As the last step you need to install the frontend.

sudo apt install -y git
git clone https://github.com/sitespeedio/throttle-frontend.git
cd throttle-frontend
npm install --production

Start the frontend with:

node lib/app.js

And open your browser and access http://<raspberrypiip>:3001

Change throttling using the API

Instead of using the graphical frontend, you can use the API to change the throttling. Call the API with the profile you want to use.

Set throttling to cable:

curl http://raspberrypi.local:3001/api/cable -H "Accept: application/json"

Set throttling to 3g:

curl http://raspberrypi.local:3001/api/3g -H "Accept: application/json"

Stop throttling:

curl http://raspberrypi.local:3001/api/stop -H "Accept: application/json"

Take a copy of your SD card

This is how I do it on my Mac. First make sure you have your SD card inserted. Then use diskutil list to find the disk. On my computer it's mounted as /dev/disk2. Then to copy and compress it I use:

sudo dd if=/dev/rdisk2 bs=1m | xz -T 0 -9 -e > /Users/peter/Desktop/humble-version.xz

Note that I've changed /dev/disk2 to /dev/rdisk2 to make it read only.