 Today we're going to use an old router to create a Wi-Fi bridge using OpenWareTay and why is that? Because during COVID we built this nice office for my wife But it doesn't have a network connection. So we're gonna fix that today. This is gonna work a lot better Want it? Yes At the back of any router you'll find a reset button. That's also true for the TP-Link Often you it's a small hole you need to put a pin through. In this case, it's a regular button So we're gonna press it for a few seconds so it will reset It's most likely something from five to ten seconds. So let's do ten seconds in this case It's resetting I think because it's flashing plug in the ethernet connection And now let's see what happens Like this So the first thing you're gonna want to do is unplug that router because you want your IP address from your basic Router and not from the router. You've just reset it This is so we have an internet connection because we need to download OpenWareTay first We go to the OpenWareTay website and under downloads you can find the firmware selector So I've got a TP-Link 1043 and I'm running hardware version 2 which is this one But you can select your modem or router of choice and then you've got two options The first one is a sys upgrade. You use a sys upgrade if you're already running OpenWareTay And want to upgrade to the latest version or you download the factory image The factory image is used to replace the existing operating system in your router, which is what we want So we click download and then we download the file here Now that we've got this it's time to plug in the router again For some of us it might be impossible to use the ethernet connection because our computer doesn't support it or our laptop doesn't support it But if you reset your router it often also starts sending out its original Wi-Fi signal So you can also connect via Wi-Fi and once the router is plugged in or you're connected to the Wi-Fi signal You should be getting a new IP address In my case the IP address I got is 153 in the default gateway That's the place where your modem router is at is 0.1.1 So I'm serving to 0.192.1.1. I'm already running OpenWareTay on this device But we're gonna act as if I'm not Every OS you're running on your router will have an option to upgrade its firmware and that's what we're gonna do And in this case, we're gonna flash a new image Which is the one we just downloaded and now we can upload the file force upgrade and now Downloaded firmware will be flashed into your modem router and once it reboots it will be running the latest version One of the ways you can check if your device is already back if is to run IPconfig Right now it has an IP address, but it might be that the device isn't reacting. You can send a ping message to it If you press the minus T it will keep on pinging the device until it's available In this case, it says it's already available again. So let's test that in a new tab It's saying it's an unsafe connection and that's because it's forcing a secure connection, but it doesn't have Signed certificate for that. That's totally okay because the connection will be secure so we can proceed to it and Now we are in to the OpenWareTay Login page. You don't need to set up a password. It also says it isn't set up yet So now we've got the new firmware running in the Your modem router, which is great because now we can set it up as a Wi-Fi bridge. What is a Wi-Fi bridge? Basically a Wi-Fi bridge takes the existing Wi-Fi connection Captures it and then creates a local network based on that network connection When is it useful? Most laptops Don't have a very strong Wi-Fi connection and some of the connections you have at other places will be connected via ethernet And won't support Wi-Fi at all So if you want a stronger signal, a better connection and a more stable connection, a Wi-Fi bridge is very useful Basically the Wi-Fi bridge Replaces the cable and other than that it starts acting like an extension of your network. We're now trying to set it up So the first thing we're gonna want to do is give it a static IP address As you saw in in my network configuration my default IP addresses my my network gives out is In the 10.1 range You want to have a different address range. So for example for me, it could be 9.1 range. So that's what we're going to do We're going to give it an IP address outside of this existing range We're already using for this. We're going to network and interfaces You'll see the long interface and we can edit it And we can say we wanted to have a static IP address, which is did IP address We wanted to have a default subnet mask and you're gonna be okay The second thing we're gonna want to do is disable DHCP DHCP is the thing giving out IP addresses But since we're gonna extend it like a bridge We want our main router to be the device giving out the IP addresses and not this one So the second thing we're gonna do is we're gonna ignore this interface and save it And now it's gonna stop giving out IP addresses Two other things you can do but you aren't obligated to do but one of the things you can do is set up your Gateway address. That's the main address of the main device giving out IPs and in the advanced settings you can adjust the DNS server the DNS server is the device translating for example www.google.nl or .com to an IP address and one of the open DNS servers you can use is 8.8.8.8 Which is the one from Google Now that we've done this it's time to connect this device to the existing Wi-Fi network. So we're gonna go to wireless and And we're gonna scan for wireless existing wireless connections In my case the wireless network is called Sun and I can join that network. I do have to give in the Bepiaki which I'm gonna do off-camera Make sure that the operating frequency is the same and the channel and the width is the same as the device you're connecting to That's to make sure that the network connection is gonna be stable and now we can click save We can remove the existing open air T interface and we can then click save and apply and all the changes will be applied Don't remove this interface if you're connected wirelessly, of course We can remove this interface because we're connected via the network cable But if we aren't we aren't gonna be able to reach the device again If you are connected via Wi-Fi and remove the wireless interface What we need to do now is connect the two interfaces we have the wireless and the LAN interface and for that we need to create a bridge We can add a new interface here a relay bridge And we need to select as a protocol relay bridge But as we can see it's currently not present and that's because relay D isn't installed yet Now relay D isn't called relay D anymore in open air T 21 But if you go to system and software You can check which packages are available and we need to look for Lucy proto relay Let's first update the list to see which packages are there And now we can find Lucy proto relay and install it. This is to create the relay D pseudo bridge This is where the power of open air T really comes in these software packages is what makes this operating system for your modem route Are so unique as we can see if we go to the installed Plugins we can see your proto relay is installed And now that that's done. We do need to reboot the device so it becomes operational After the reboot we can go to network interfaces We can now create a new interface which is called a relay bridge and select relay bridge to create the interface We need to connect the lung and the one interface and in the firewall settings. We need to connect them both as well The HP should be turned off and we can now save this and apply this We can remove the access one Interfaces which are still there Click save and apply and basically we're done now and to test this We can now disable the network the Wi-Fi network disconnect from it And it should now get a IP address from the Via its bridge One thing that's good to know is that you can now reach this device via its one IP So this is the IP address of the device So anything connected to your network will now be able to still reach this web interface on this new IP It's gotten from your existing modem router So for some reason my computer wasn't able to reach the network via the OpenVariate device So I rebooted my PC and now you can see that I'm not able to connect to IP 1.1 anymore, which should be the case You can also see that I am connected to a network So it seems to be working and I'm not connected to Wi-Fi anymore So if I'm right, we should now have an internet connection via our new bridge Which is the case So it's working. Thanks for watching this video. I hope you learned something I hope you're able to reuse your old hardware as well, and I hope to catch you in the next one. Cheers