Recently, my wife had been experiencing issues connecting to the internet since the router was on the other side of the house. I thought the best solution was to transfer it into our computer room so she could get access straight through an ethernet cable connected to our switch. While that quickly resolved her issues, I found myself lacking a connection. I did the right thing and decided to make my own router with a Raspberry Pi I had recently gotten for Christmas. The process was pretty straight forward, I just had to install OpenWrt to a fresh install of Raspbian lite and configure a few settings and I was off to the races. I think it can be a pretty useful device at the end of the day. It connects to a local network using the on board WiFi and the original plan was to connect to it via ethernet. However, I became curious and configured my Netgear WiFi adapter to it and now I can connect my phone and other devices to it. We can expand it even further by adding a VPN to it so I can bring it with us on vacations for a safe local network. The biggest issue I've had so far is the effectiveness of the WiFi adapter. Currently I have to stand about 6 feet away to obtain an excellent connection. If I reach about 10 feet away, the signal degrades almost entirely. It's pretty old though so that could be a factor.  I'll probably order a new adapter and keep you posted on how it improves!

P.S. - My internet isn't amazing, but this little guy did give me a good 8-12 Mbps boost when I did the speed test!