OMAP Wireless Connectivity WLAN AP demo NLCP GUI

Access Point use-cases

This section presents guide-lines to operating the SoftAP mode; The EVM acts as an AP that is building the WiFi network with the Access Point, and then connecting via a remote laptop (that acts as a Station) to the AP through the WLAN media. At the end, connection verification is done using Ping commands.


This page demonstrates 3 main demo use-cases:

1. Basic AP use-case.
2. Web Browsing.
3. Web Browsing with a Local Web Browser.

Basic AP use-case

Press the “Wi-Fi” icon on the Screen, In order to get into the WiFi sub menu



Press the “SoftAP” icon on the Screen, In order to get into the AP option



The message screen shows the AP relevant AP information:

1. AP’s SSID is: TexasInstruments_001
2. AP’s IP Address is 192.168.0.1
3. AP is working in G band in channel 6, and is configured to work without security

Note that that description is the default Configuration Out Of Box, and can be modified by editing the /etc/hostapd.conf file and for more information access <Define AP mode>, However the message screen will not changed to reflect the that change.

Press the “RUN” icon (White Icon in the middle of the screen), In order to start the AP functionality

Use your Station to Connect to the AP

Now that the AP is up, the following sequence can be used to connect to the access point:

• Perform a scan on your station laptop and make sure that the 'TexasInstruments_001' is visible.
• Connenct to the 'TexasInstruments_001' access point.
• use "ping 192.168.0.1" (i.e., default AP IP address), to make sure the connection is working.

Web Browsing

Following is a demo showing how to use the EVM in Soft AP mode, and how to use it a Router to surf the web. Follow the instructions below:

1. Connect the EVM Ethernet port to the WAN network using an Ethernet cable.
2. Use dhcp to aquire an ip address for the EVM ethernet port from the router:

udhcpc -i eth0

1. Activate the EVM in Soft AP mode, the first step is to configure the hostapd configuration file. For simple configuration, use a non-secured network, as shown in the following link: <Connect to non Secured network>
2. Set the DHCP server configuration as shown in the following link: <setting DHCP server configuration>
3. Activate the DHCP server and the NAT functionality, as shown in the following link: <Activate the EVM as Access point>
4. Connect the PC to the WiFi network created by the EVM.
5. Define the PC to get the IP address using DHCP.
6. Open the Web Browser application on the PC and start surfing the web.

Web Browsing with a Local Web Browser

In case there is no internet connection available for Demonstrating the Web Access, as an alternative - it possible to demonstrate web browsing where the web server is located on the PC which is connected to the EVM (that works in Soft AP mode) through the Ethernet port.
For Web server we used Apache (any other web server can be suitable as well), it is an open-source HTTP server for modern operating systems including UNIX and Windows. The web server can be downloaded from: <Apache web server>. (for demo we used the Apache HTTP Server 2.2.19 Release, that was published on 2011-05-22)

For the Demo, follow the steps below:

1. For Demo, use Apache web server (or any other available web server) that can be downloaded from: <Apache web server>
2. Install the web server on the PC that will behave as the internet cloud.
3. Download the wiki page html source from: <wiki Page Source>
4. Extract the zip file to a local folder on the PC.
5. Set the html web page that is seen when browsing the web server to the location where you extracted the wiki page sources.
6. Connect the Web Server PC to the EVM using an Ethernet cable. Turn on the EVM after plugging in the Ethernet cable.
7. Set the Web Server PC Ethernet port to have a static IP, for example: use 10.1.1.2 and the gateway to be 10.1.1.3. This gateway value would be the IP address of the EVM Ethernet port, so all the PC communication will go through the EVM.

1. Set the EVM Ethernet port to have a static IP address in the same subnet, for example: 10.1.1.3

ifconfig eth0 10.1.1.3 netmask 255.255.255.0 up

Now verify the IP address of the Ethernet port, using the following command:

root@am37x-evm:~# ifconfig
eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:50:C2:7E:96:48
          inet addr:10.1.1.3  Bcast:10.1.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          UP BROADCAST MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:100 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:15 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:8150 (7.9 KiB)  TX bytes:4718 (4.6 KiB)
          Interrupt:33

1. Activate the EVM in Soft AP mode, the first step is to configure the hostapd configuration file. For simple configuration, use a non-secured network, as shown in the following link Basic AP use-case.
2. Connect the PC to the WiFi network created by the EVM
3. Define the PC to get the IP address using DHCP (for example the IP Address is 192.168.0.20)

Were the IP address are:
10.1.1.3 – is the EVM Ethernet address
10.1.1.2 is the PC Ethernet IP address
192.168.0.1 is the EVM Wireless LAN IP address
192.168.0.20 is the PC Wireless LAN IP address

1. Open the Web Browser application on the PC and start surfing the web

For more information...

For more information on Soft AP (hostapd) configuration, use the following link <wl12xx hostapd configuration >

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