Trigger Guest WiFi via 'Smart' Button?

[necromancyr]

Ok, this is a bit of an oddball request but...bear with me.

Is there a way to send a command to Merlin to turn on guest wifi for a period of time through some kind of command/trigger?

I dislike having my guest wifi on all the time, but I always forget to turn it on when we do have guests. What I'd like to do is have a button setup through SmartThings and WebCore that sends a command to my router that turns on the Guest WiFi for the preset period of time whenever the button gets pressed.

This way, guests could just hit the button and turn it on w/o me having to stop grilling, bartending, etc.

I realize this is somewhat outside the norm - but I figured I'd ask here (before the SmartThings or WebCore forums) because if there's no way to send the command, this pretty much is DOA.

 

[dave14305]

I’ve never done it, but I would start by testing with these commands, using 2.4Ghz Guest network #1 in the example.

nvram set wl0.1_bss_enabled=1
nvram commit
service restart_wireless

The restart wireless could be a dealbreaker since it will take down all wireless for a moment. Someone may know a better wl command to do the same.

 

[Jack Yaz]

I’ve never done it, but I would start by testing with these commands, using 2.4Ghz Guest network #1 in the example.

nvram set wl0.1_bss_enabled=1
nvram commit
service restart_wireless

The restart wireless could be a dealbreaker since it will take down all wireless for a moment. Someone may know a better wl command to do the same.

wl -i wl0.1 radio off >/dev/null 2>&1
sleep 10
wl -i wl0.1 radio on >/dev/null 2>&1

I don't know if this will load the nvram variable though

 

[TechTinkerer]

Quite an interesting idea guest vpn on a schedule-timer..maybe with wps button

 

[dave14305]

wl -i wl0.1 radio off >/dev/null 2>&1
sleep 10
wl -i wl0.1 radio on >/dev/null 2>&1

I don't know if this will load the nvram variable though

This would be a good iOS shortcut, in fact I had started recreating scMerlin as an iOS shortcut at one point during lockdown.

 

[Jack Yaz]

This would be a good iOS shortcut, in fact I had started recreating scMerlin as an iOS shortcut at one point during lockdown.

i could expose all the functions as CLI commands if that'd help?

 

[alba666]

Hmmm, I think the Asus Alexa skill does exactly what you are trying to do.

 

[necromancyr]

Wow, didn't expect so many great responses so quickly! The Asus Alexa skill does look like it does what I would want - but it doesn't seem to work on the ac86u, which is what I have. Also, I'm a bit concerned there's some exposure of the router there from a security perspective that I'm not skilled enough to check - but I can't validate that. Not certain if it would be a locally processed command or something from Amazon servers.

And apologies if this is a stupid/basic question - still learning a bit. Aside from the command line, how would you send these commands to the router? (The follow-up to that adds "securely" to the end, but I think knowing at all how to send commands to the router would be useful.) Please just point me to a guide if you know of a good one or manual I'm missing as well. Feel like this would be really powerful to understand fully. Would this be doable through scMerlin or similar?