Creating an Access Point with a Raspberry Pi Model b (Original RPi) and a TP-Link TL-WN725N v3

I had to be very specific on the title because I am unsure if this will work with other models or versions but in theory it should, it all should, but that is the same thing I thought when I was doing this.

This was done with a fresh Raspberry OS install and no additional configurations, I have an ethernet connection and the adapter (TL-WN725N v3) which was being recognized and seemed to work fine, could get a connection established but something was funky and I could not figure it out.

After much trial and error (saving you time here) I found out the following documentation:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?uid=81098&f=28&t=62371&start=0#p462982

From the above link there is a way to get the appropiate version of the driver (8188eu) which eluded me for a while (don't judge me, I tried my best here and thought the one that came with the Pi worked fine).

Here is a link that takes you directly to the drivers, in order to know which one is the right one for you do uname -r in the CLI to figure out your version: http://downloads.fars-robotics.net/wifi-drivers/8188eu-drivers/

Got that done? Good, now go and get yourself rasp-ap, a Web GUI to configure the RPi as an AP or AP-STA without having to do it all by your own, note that this is working through HTTP so you may want to get this working out with HTTPS through the command provided in the same website almost at the bottom: https://raspap.com/

If everything is good all should be green and up, don't forget to reboot for good measure.

For personal good measure I dropped port 80 (for HTTP) in the iptables because it would seem like HTTP continues to work regardless if you have the certificate or not, also the port doesn't change anything aside from the port in which you would be connecting to be it HTTP or HTTPS, doesn't mean it will switch over and drop the HTTP connection.

Hope this helps!

Additional Note:

When the Kernel version is updated on your RPi remember to update the version of your driver from the fars-robotics.net website, if you upgrade and eventually restart this will stop working.