How do I start and stop the on board wireless access point?

Question

I would like to have my wireless access point available at particular periods of the day and not at others. I have a RPi3+ running default Raspbian and followed https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/wireless/access-point.md to get the access point up and running using the onboard wifi. What is the best command line to switch the access point on and off properly? Thank you.

Answer 1

I assume you are using Raspbian and you have setup the access point with hostapd. To switch the access point this commands should do:

rpi ~$ sudo systemctl stop hostapd.service
rpi ~$ sudo systemctl start hostapd.service

It is difficult to say much more about start/stop hostapd because I don't know anything about your setup. Do you use a stand alone access point, or with a wired uplink (eth0), or with a wireless uplink (wlan0) together with wpa_supplicant? If you use a setup with systemd-networkd then you have clean control over the services with start/stop. To get an idea what I mean you may have a look at Setting up a Raspberry Pi as an access point - the easy way and Access point as WiFi repeater, optional with bridge. The last one has a tested table what happens with start/stop the services.