I am experimenting on a 1st gen Pi with some friends. We are building a simple website for a competition and were wondering if we could use the Pi as a captive portal in order to display our site immediately after a user connects. http://sirlagz.net/2013/08/23/how-to-captive-portal-on-the-raspberry-pi/ I found this guide but it requires a wifi dongle for the RaspberryPi to act as an access point. My question is can I connect a router to the Pi and use that combo for our captive portal? P.S. The site will be deployed on a local computer
You can. You'll have to configure which interface to use as a Hotspot, in your hotspot config. HotSpot config depends on the tool you use to provide HotSpot... I use hostapd on my Linux Mint machine.
(I find personnally the wifi dongle simplier/quicker to use).
Note : important to distinguish HotSpot notion from Captive notion. Generally, one made a captive wifi hotspot. But you can do non-captive Wifi, or captive Ethernet... I personnally did the same (local website on server providing wifi captive hotspot. Wifi hostpot on linux (mint, based on ubuntu) and I made it captive with redirections). But I use the wifi card embedded. I have a rasp and I find wifidongle quite cool.