I am setting up a campervan and unfortunately don't have my starlink dish set up. Currently I have a Raspberry Pi running OpenWrt and an AP (TP link EAP-610) acting as a dumb AP.
I would like to have access to the internet while maintaining the SSID I have set up on my AP. Ideally I would just cut out the RPi until my dish is up and bridge my AP with my phone or home network. Unfortunately my AP does not support bridging (it is a mesh device and can only repeat other APs of the same model/make).
Could I set up OpenWRT to do the bridging (even if the RPi is not being used wirelessly)? How would I do this?
In diagram form here's what I would like to do:
External AP (ssid1)
<-wireless->
My AP (receiving/sending on ssid1)
<-wired->
RPi/OpenWrt
<-wired->
My AP (receiving/sending on ssid2)
<-wireless->
My devices
Do you require the downstream network to be on the same subnet as the upstream? If not, the easiest and highest performance solution is to use standard routing as a client to the upstream wifi.
If there is a requirement that the devices need to be on the same subnet, then you will need to look at relayd. This method has some quirks and is not ideal, but is the way to make this work unless the upstream AP is running OpenWrt (in that case, you could use wds or mesh/802.11s).
Also, keep in mind that this wireless uplink + <relayd | routing> needs to happen on the same device.
And, the Pi (4 or higher) is a perfectly good wired router option, but the built in wifi is severely limited. It has overall very poor performance (range, bandwidth, and also the ability to service multiple clients) due to the 1x1 radio design. It is also unable to operate in STA + AP modes simultaneously -- it can only do one or the other. And it only supports one band (2.4G or 5G) at a time. For anything more, you'll need a better wifi solution.