Provisioning WiFi IoT devices

or

“How do you get the local WiFi details into a consumer device that doesn’t have a keyboard or screen?”

It’s been an on going problem since we started to put WiFi in everything. The current solution seams to be have the device behave like it’s own access point first and then connect a phone or laptop to this network in order to enter the details of the real WiFi network. While this works it’s a clunky solution that relies on a user being capable of disconnecting from their current network and connecting to the new device only network. It also requires the access point mode to be shutdown in order to try the supplied WiFi credentials which causes the phone/laptop to disconnect and normally reconnect to it’s normal network. This means if the user makes a typo then they have to wait for the device to realise the credentials are wrong and at best go back into access point mode or you have to manually reset the device to have it start over. This really isn’t a good solution.

I’ve been trying to come up with a better solution, specifically for my linear clock project. You may ask why a wall clock needs to be connected to the internet, but since it’s Raspberry Pi powered, which has no persistent real time clock it needs a way to set the time in the case of power outages. I also want a way to allow users to change the colours for the hours, mins and seconds and adjust brightness levels.

In order to add WiFi to the Raspberry Pi Zero I’m using the RedBear IoT pHat which as well as providing WiFi it includes Bluetooth 4.0 support. This opens up a new avenue to use for configuration. The idea is to have the device start as a Eddystone beacon broadcasting a URL. The URL will host a page that uses Web Bluetooth to connect to the device and allow the WiFi SSID and password to be entered. Assuming the credentials are correct the IP address can be pushed to the page allowing a link to be presented to a page served by the device to then configure the more day to day options.

We had a hackday at the office recently and I had a go at implementing all of this.

Firstly the device comes up as an Eddystone Beacon that broadcasts the URL to the configuration page:

When the page loads is shows a button to search for the devices with bluetooth. This is because the Web Bluetooth spec currently requires a user interaction to start a BLE session.

Chrome then displays a list of matching devices to connect to.

When the user selects a given device the form appears to allow the SSID and password to be entered and submitted.

Once the details are submitted the page will wait until the device has bound to the WiFi network, it then displays a link directly to the device so any further configuration can be carried out.

The code for this is all up on GitHub here if anybody wants to play. The web front end needs a little work and I’m planning to add WiFi AP scanning and pre-population soon.

Now we just need Apple to get their finger out and implement Web Bluetooth