Grand Visual PiFi

We love free public Wifi – who doesn’t (especially when you’re in a busy area where mobile data is slow)? With this in mind, in addition to us wanting to find projects for our Raspberry Pi, we set out to create a public WiFi hotspot.

While the task of creating a hotspot is easy, we wanted to add the functionality of a ‘captive portal’. A captive portal is when you connect to a hotspot and are presented with a page (you often have to agree to terms) before you are granted access. This is a great idea for advertisers who want to provide WiFi and to show the end user who has supplied this via adverts in static image or video form.

Using a Raspberry Pi, a WiFi dongle and a 4G modem we’ve managed to create a truly mobile hotspot for us to use at events. Pretty handy!