After a hardware upgrade I ended up with a spare mini pc. Noticed these two icons and thought I might be able to use it as a WiFi access point with VLANs using OPNsense.
Is that possible? If so, what do I even need to buy to plug into there?
I don’t need it to do any fancy dhcp, dns or firewall stuff, I just need a WiFi access point with support for VLANs.
Not all of these mini PCs have a wifi card in them even if they have the antennas for it. You might start by opening it to check whether the wifi antennas are connected, or whether you need to add a WiFi card.
I think OPNsense would do what you’re looking for. I use it on a mini PC as my router, and it’s great, but I have not used it for WiFi (I run a separate access point). The limitation is WiFi hardware support. You will need to make sure your mini PC’s WiFi card has a driver in FreeBSD. Intel hardware is often a better bet than Realtek etc.
https://docs.opnsense.org/manual/how-tos/interface_wireless_internal.html
Intel AX200/210 cards do work on FreeBSD but people are having problems with it in AP mode, even on Linux. I didn’t try, but I planned to do the similar thing on NanoPi R5S with OpenWRT and gave up after the research.