How to configure the Raspberry Pi to create its own WiFi independent of your home WiFi - and take the Poolside Factory Dock Adapter to the Beach

If you want to use the Poolside Factory Dock Adapter in your car or take it outside, away from your home WiFi, then you can configure the Raspberry Pi to become a WiFi access point and create its own WiFi that you can connect to with your phone.

To get this started, you'll first need a way to log into your Raspberry Pi for configuring it to create the access point. 

Step 1: Follow these steps to create a Raspberry Pi SD card that connects to your home WiFi first. 

Step 2: Then install and configure the Raspberry Pi for Airplay streaming using these steps. 

Step 3: Then make the Raspberry Pi create its own WiFi access point and disconnect it from your home WiFi: 

Configuring the Raspberry Pi as an Access Point (PiOS Bookworm onwards)

Note, this requires at least the Raspberry Pi OS version called Bookworm or newer. For the Raspberry Pi Zero 2, the Raspberry Pi Imager is not showing  Raspberry Pi OS Lite (64-bit) Bookworm as an option at the time of writing, but it works well on the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 for the purpose of creating an Airplay adapter. Install it as described in Step 1.

Instead of My New WiFi Name and  My New WiFi Password  below, enter what you'd like for the dock.  Keep the quotes. You could chose the same name for the WiFi as you selected for the hostname.  For instance something like "iPodHifi-LivingRoom".

sudo nmcli con add con-name hotspot ifname wlan0 type wifi ssid "My New WiFi Name"
sudo nmcli con modify hotspot wifi-sec.key-mgmt wpa-psk
sudo nmcli con modify hotspot wifi-sec.psk "My New WiFI Password"
sudo nmcli con modify hotspot 802-11-wireless.mode ap 802-11-wireless.band bg ipv4.method shared
sudo nmcli con modify hotspot connection.autoconnect yes
sudo nmcli con modify preconfigured connection.autoconnect no

Now the Raspberry Pi is configured to create its own access point.  Once you reboot, it will no longer connect to your home WiFi, but you will be able to connect to its newly created WiFi Access Point. If you happen to have an Ethernet cable connected to your Raspberry Pi connecting it with the internet, it would even share that internet connection with who connects to the access point.

sudo reboot

If you need to log into the Raspberry Pi now, make sure you are connected to the WiFi of the created access point, and log in as usual with 

ssh MYRASPBERRYPISHOSTNAME.local

If you want to make the Raspberry Pi connect again to your home WiFi and no longer create its own WiFi access point, you can run the following command:

sudo nmcli con modify preconfigured connection.autoconnect yes
sudo nmcli con modify hotspot connection.autoconnect no
sudo reboot

The 'preconfigured' connection is your home wifi preconfigured with the raspberry pi imager when creating the SD card image. If you want to see the current settings, you can use

nmcli connection show preconfigured

Or use the graphical UI

nmtui