I'm developing a project consisting in several stations deployed very close to the sea. For every station i'm deploying a Raspberry PI w/ rasbian, with some arduino stuff reading meteo parameters (wind speed/gust and direction for now) and activating switches and servos accordingly. On every RPi there's an Apache server installed and a simple maintenance page (php based).
Some of the stations will connect to internet (cabled) some other will be mounted far away from any connection, likely all of them will be mounted close to a power panel, hard to access even for maintenance. Still some (software) setting up will be needed once in a while, possibly during storms.
It's crucial for the aim of the project to easily be able to set up some parameter once in a while for correct functioning. No problem for the boards lan connected: simply using a browser from any remote device able to access to the RPi web page. What about the ones not connected to internet? Is it possible to configure the RPi to act as an access point in order to let any device (a smartphone or ipad) in the neightbours to see the WLAN, connect to it and furthermore be forced to open the browser to the maintenance web page (a sort of hotspot captive portal welcome page)?
Any suggestion will be appreciated Thankx
