digitalsuper8

I have a NanoPi Neo Air now working as wifi accesspoint, showing SSID and allowing me to connect. My first trials with the apmode.sh (thanks FergusL) gave me the same problem that most of you had: There was an SSID being broadcast but I simply couldn't connect. In my case I believe the problem was doing:
rmmod dhd modprobe dhd op_mode=2 Because this brought down the wlan0 module and I found out that thereafter the wlan0 doesn't have an IP address anymore. This causes problems for dnsmasq and leads to dnsmasq not issueing ip-addresses to devices that connect to hostapd. So hostapd accepts the password but dnsmasq doesn't provide an IP address so you cannot connect..
 
So here's what I did:
1. I disabled NetworkManager once (that then makes that permanently disabled at boot up):
/bin/systemctl stop NetworkManager /bin/systemctl disable NetworkManager 2. Because Armbian in my case started up hostapd and dnsmasq during boot I disabled those too.
/bin/systemctl disable hostapd /bin/systemctl disable dnsmasq 3. I wrote a script that first brings down wlan0 (ifdown wlan0), then runs the ' rmmod dhd' and 'modprobe dhd op_mode=2' commands. After that it brings up wlan0 (ifup wlan0), so that it again gets an IP address (it uses the 'interfaces'  file for that). Finally the script starts hostapd and dnsmasq:
ifdown wlan0 rmmod dhd modprobe dhd op_mode=2 ifup wlan0 /bin/systemctl start hostapd /bin/systemctl start dnsmasq  
I created a service based on that script and enabled it with systemctl so that at each boot automatically the nanopi neo air is in wifi accesspoint mode and will broadcast SSID and allows connections.
I need to look up the exact script and the service files and will post those. It worked for my set up, hope it helps.