/router-rebooter

Primary LanguagePythonMIT LicenseMIT

Router-rebooter

This is a Python project designed for Raspberry Pi.

It monitors network connectivity with pings to public addresses that should always be reachable. If the internet is down, it attempts to reboot your home router by pulsing a GPIO pin, which is intended to toggle a relay that supplies power to your home router (hopefully fixing the connectivity issue).

Overall project inspired by a blog post by Justin Blaber. I figured this could be paired with some simple network monitoring to fix a common issue: most home routers get "stuck" from time to time and need to be reset. If you're not at home to pull the plug, this can be a real drag, especially if you're counting on something at home to have continual internet access. This project gives you a fully automated solution requiring only about $50 worth of hardware.

Getting started

  1. You'll need a Raspberry Pi that runs Linux and a full Python (i.e., Pico won't work, but anything Zero or bigger will do.) I use an antiquated One Model B+. Setup any Linux on it, such as Raspberry Pi OS.

  2. You'll need an IoT Power Relay and a couple of wires. If your Pi has male GPIO header pins, male/female jumper wires work really nicely. Connect the Pi to the relay as in Justin's blog post. Remember which GPIO pin # you picked.

  3. Clone this repo to your Pi. Run ./router_rebooter.py --help for a list of options and default settings.

If you used GPIO pin 21 and intend to test the internet using WiFi interface wlan0, all default settings can be used. In this case, you can run ./router_rebooter.py to kick off the monitoring cycle. Messages will be printed to STDERR.

Running router-rebooter as a daemon

I recommend using supervisord to do this, which avoids the trouble of writing and installing rc.d scripts or mucking with systemd. A quick intro of how this works on the RPi is in this StackExchange answer.

A sample supervisord configuration file that can be dropped into /etc/supervisor/conf.d
is included in this repo. I recommend running the script as a unique, low-privilege user.

Author

Theodore Pak

License

MIT. See LICENSE.txt