Electronic – Connecting a simple device with the secured home wifi

communicationwifi

I am planning on building a simple device, which retrieves information over wifi. The device shall be as cheap and simple as possible, so it won't have a keyboard or a display.

My question is: What possibilities are there to connect said device with my secured home network without having the keyboard/display to chose a the right network or to type in the security credentials?

Best Answer

If the device is sophisticated enough to connect to Wi-Fi, it probably has some fairly powerful microprocessor to implement enough of the stack to be able to do this. If that is the case, maybe you can support an AP mode in the device (it acts as an access point). In this mode, it exposes some trivial listener on 192.168.0.1:80 which serves up and processes an HTML form. Voila, you now have a keyboard and screen with which you can configure client credentials. A sliding switch on the device can toggle it beween AP and wireless client mode.