The Raspberry Pi 0 W is a small computer with a single core arm processor, 500 megabytes of ram and storage capabilities with a micro sd card slot. I decided to turn my Raspberry Pi 0 into a portable wifi access point. Because the Raspberry Pi 0 is so small and requires very little power, it is very easy to power it using a portable battery and just leave it in a backpack somewhere near by.

Reasons

Having a portable wifi access point can be very useful if you need a local area network to connect multiple devices to so that those devices can communicate with each other on a private network. I set up my Raspberry Pi 0 so that it would forward it’s incoming Ethernet to it’s outgoing wifi connection and to all of the devices that are connected to it.

An example use for the Raspberry Pi 0 as a wireless access point would be if you want to connect your devices to a wifi router that you have access to but want to use something like pi-hole, which is a DNS level ad blocker. In this situation you could simply load pi-hole onto your Raspberry Pi and then forward the Ethernet connection from your Raspberry Pi 0 to your wireless devices via the wifi access point set up on your Raspberry Pi 0. Another use for a Raspberry Pi 0 as a wifi access point is that you can use it as a local area network and connect all of your devices, and play games and use programs that require devices to be on the same LAN.

Conclusion

Using the Raspberry Pi as a portable local area network is a good idea, especially for the price. This project takes an intermediate understanding of networking and Linux but works very well once completed. If your looking to create one for yourself, checkout the links below and make sure that if you want a wifi capable local area network, that you buy the Raspberry Pi 0 W.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/wireless/access-point-routed.md

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=raspberry+pi+0+w