After working on TRACER I still had many features remaining that I wanted to complete including:

• Allowing the laptop to connect to the raspberry pi without an internet connection
• Implementing path following and path planning
• Better AI control based on distance not time (eg, drive forward for 5 feet)

I started with the easiest of these 3, which was allowing the laptop to connect without an internet connection.

No Wi-Fi

Currently, the laptop and raspberry pi create web servers that can communicate with one another via Wi-Fi. This works great inside where there is a Wi-Fi network, but fails outside or whenever there's no Wi-Fi network.

This can be easily fixed by configuring the raspberry-pi to act as a self-contained access point (AP), so my laptop can connect to the Wi-Fi network produced by the raspberry pi and then communicate with it.

The setup process

Setting up a Wi-Fi AP on the raspberry pi was relatively simple:

First, I had to install the required packages: hostapd and dnsmasq:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install hostapd dnsmasq

And initially disable them while I was setting them up:

sudo systemctl stop hostapd
sudo systemctl stop dnsmasq

These processes run in the background and are known as daemons

Then, I had to update the configuration of the DHCP daemon which automatically configures network interfaces: