I recently installed Qual.net on two raspberry pi’s in order to experiment with mesh networking. The documentation on using Qual.net with raspberry pi is limited and I found that it requires having quite a bit of knowledge concerning networking in order to properly configure the rapsberry pis.

I was using the Raspberry Pi 2 model B. I downloaded the whole repo here: https://github.com/wachterjud/qaul.net

In order to get Qaul working on the pi, I had to follow their readMe documentation here: https://github.com/WachterJud/qaul.net/tree/master/raspberry

There are two ways to run Qaul on raspberry pi: ethernet or wifi. So far I have only been able to get ethernet to work – but even this, I am unsure wether or not it is running properly.
For wifi, I was having trouble getting the raspberry pi to broadcast the Qaul free SSID and am not sure where to begin debugging as there is an enormous amount of code infrastructure.

Essentially what I got running here was the qaul.net web chat site. This seemed to be served up by the raspberry pi. The pi was hooked up to ethernet – so as long as I was within the same local network, I was able to access the website by typing in the IP. This allowed communication between my macbook and the pi.

The problem with this so far is that it is still dependent on existing networking infrastructure – the network provided by the school. This is no different than creating my own locally served website and simply broadcasting my IP address for others to access.

I recently purchased a TP-Link nano WR702N router and hope to hook that up to the raspberry pi. Perhaps this will allow me to broadcast a wifi signal independent of existing infrastructure.