Hi there,
Just joined the forums 
I have a qustion regarding octoprint and using it as a wifi extender, thing is I have a qidi tech 1 printer and its upstairs, now I got octoprint installed no problems and set it up and then I found out if could act as a wifi extender also, I have 2 kids and they live on the floor above where the printer is essentially a loft conversion, their wifi signal is utter rubbish up there as the router is on the ground floor, I have about 4 powerline adapters and have a spare, so I was wondering could I have octoprint and have it act as a wifi extender so the kids up stairs can use their phones.
I am going to plug the rp3 into the powerline adpater next to the printer and then wifi through the upper part of the house.
Can this be done? or no I need to use raspbian and install the elements from octoprint on there?
Many thanks in advance 
OctoPrint isn't the right term to use, OctoPi, the operating system hosting OctoPrint, is the right term. OctoPi is based on Raspbian-Lite so most guides for Raspbian should work.
This forum is probably not the best place to ask this question. I would refer you to the following links (and there are many more I found with a Google search):
https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-wifi-extender/
https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-wireless-access-point/
https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/wireless/access-point.md
The only thing I will caution you about is that depending on your kids' wifi usage, there may not be enough horsepower in the RPi to handle both your kids and printing at the same time.
Most dedicated wifi routers can be configured as access points and/or wifi extenders (and are cheaper to buy than either).
Hi thanks for the reply,
My apologies, octopi yes I have been following those guide but always fail when I restart the dhcpd service and then I have trouble getting the pi to get a screen up, I installed raspbian stretch and the same thing happened so I will go back to octopi as its clearly something I am doing wrong, regarding the kids and wifi it will be via phones anyway as they have a powerline up stairs, the wifi just sucks up there
If you configure the RPi as an access point, then there shouldn't be a need for a DHCP service as you already have one in your network (on your router).
yeah that's what I thought I was just following a guide you linked which I found via google also, I will give it another go but like you say the pi may struggle I did buy it for the printer and thought the wifi extender was a bonus
You could, but today I bought one of these at Best Buy. The AC2200 ($200) is probably the one that's inexpensive and would do the job for your family.
I don't think that I'd burden the Raspi with all that:
- You'd have to leave the printer on all the time or when they need wi-fi
- When the printer reboots, they'd temporarily lose their connection to the Internet
- If they start playing videos your printer's RAMPS board connection could go unresponsive and you might lose a print job
sounds alot of hassle then I think I will leave it just for the printer then, and get a wifi extender or a router for upstairs or something, thanks for all your replies
You're definitely best off with that plan, as you would potentially have issues with prints, too. I'm also a QIDI 1 owner and I can tell you that, when printing via USB, the buffer isn't anywhere near large enough to handle anything that might slow down your ability to feed commands via USB. RPis have all of their connectivity on a single USB 2 bus, including the Ethernet AND WiFi, so using an OctoPi for anything beyond the printer and a USB camera while you're printing over USB is a patently bad idea.