Back in 2021 I posted the below link, 4x Raspberry Pi’s linked together to create a wifi tester. And it worked pretty well. Thought it wasn’t perfect. I fell short of what I really wanted which was a way of testing 30+ clients on an AP.

Pi Wifi Testing stack… a first?
So it got an upgrade, doubling down on what we could throw into the unit we made it a new beast of a device. So I introduce to you the Pi-WiFi-Stack.

So, here is the new item list of what is in here.

8x Raspberry Pi 4
8x 32GB MicroSD cards
11x USB A to USB-C
13x Ethernet cables
32x USB Wifi 2.4/5GHz Wifi cards
2x Anker 65-Watt Charger
3x Ubiquiti UniFi USW Flex mini switch
1x Raspberry Pi Stack 8-part with Fans… and RGB.

As you can see most of this is just increasing how many cables I need to run all of this. Though there are a few changes. I had to increase up to 3 USW-Flex switches, I could have gotten away with less, however I wanted to keep it neat, and with the cheap price of the USW-Flex I decided to spend the little extra for a neater look.

And yes, it has RGB… the stack came with them and why not add them. It looks funky.

Now let’s do a quick refresh to how it’s setup, each Pi is just running the standard Raspberian and are effectively headless since they will never have a screen plugged in. Though I have left the GUI there for now just while still working on it in case. Eventually they would be purely headless with CLI/SSH as the only way to manage them.

Each Pi has Ansible setup, with the first one in the stack as the primary device. And thanks for the help of a Developer I used to work with its running a very simple website that allows the user to get their results in a webpage instead of via terminal. I really wanted the website to work, because part of the testing in my mind is that you could put this in a classroom, and connect to it from the your office to do some extending testing without having to stay there. And this is why the device has a ethernet uplink, for me I just need to plug it into a working port, and make sure the VLAN is correct. The original design was to have it run on its own isolated network and the user would plug an ethernet cable into their device. However I soon abandoned that as I wanted it to be something that could be deployed and testing and not stuck there using it.

If you want to see more details about how I set it up, check out the original article linked above, it contains the information about how I set it up and how it went. Though the website still works and looks fine even with more details being listed.

I won’t go into any more details, as you can read it in the original post. Mainly wanted to show it is still alive and well!