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Thinking of a dilema, and looking for ideas or better, a proven process to do the following:

Imaging you have a device that has no interface but a small footprint server running on it. The device is meant to collect and send data to the cloud.

  • To configure it, one would need to access the server.

  • To access the said server, the device would first need to be connected to a network.

With a wired network interface, it's possible to connect and then access the server to configure WiFi access and such, but what if the device is WiFi only?

I'm guessing there are ways to auto-connect to an unsecured WiFi network, but connecting to a secured network poses a problem.

Any thoughts on the proper way to do something like this? I'm thinking of an approach with tethering from a laptop or cellphone to first connect, but not sure how that can be implemented (on the laptop or the device)

Thanks for thoughts.

MrE
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1 Answers1

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My solution to this has been to set the device in WiFi ad-hoc mode (i.e. the device can then be discovered by another device in ad-hoc mode) and run a small web server that scans Wifi routers around to select from, and ask the user from another device to input the credentials, then re-configure WiFi with those credentials.

MrE
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