Schedule wireless availability using ddwrt

Sometimes I have problems ending my internet use in time to get enough quality sleep.

So I decided to set up a schedule that automatically disables our wireless home network during certain night hours for “nights before work/school day” and slightly longer hours for “night before weekend day”. Luckily this is quite easily done with the ddwrt firmware that I run on my router.

I couldn’t use the “Radio Time Restrictions” feature under Wireless – Advanced Settings, because it only supports one uniform schedule for all days of the week. Instead I used ddwrt’s cron support and the wl command.

I configured the following entries under Administration – Management – Cron. This turns on the wireless every morning at 6am, shuts it down at 10:30pm on Sunday to Thursday and shuts it down at 11:45pm on Friday and Saturday:

00 06 * * *   root wl radio on
30 22 * * 0-4 root wl radio off
45 23 * * 5-6 root wl radio off

9 thoughts on “Schedule wireless availability using ddwrt”

  2. with a broadcom chip dd wrt, what would it look like for just the 2,4g on off . and please show me as i am having much trouble with this. sorry about that.

    Reply

    1. I don’t know if you can just disable 2.4GHz and leave 5GHz on. The “wl radio on/off’ commands turn the whole wireless transmitter on/off. I think you might be able to use the -i option to specify the network interface you want. See https://wiki.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Wl_command

      If you want detailed help, you have to describe what you have done so far and describe your problem in detail. Please note that I don’t use ddwrt anymore myself, so I have no way to troubleshoot your problem. You can also review the ddwrt forums and maybe ask for help there, for example: https://forum.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=896835

      Reply

  5. Very interesting, but I would like to restrict access to my son’s smartphone in selected times of day. Do you think it is possibile?

    Reply

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