Talk about smartconfig

The IoT (IOT) was born in the 1990s and developed at the end of the 21st century. With the emergence of various cheap and beautiful smart homes, especially in the past 10 years, it has truly brought the IoT to us.

The IoT aims to realize the interconnection of all things. Wi-Fi, GPRS, NB-IoT, Bluetooth, LoRa, Zigbee and other wired/wireless communication methods provide technical support for the connection. WiFi is not only an essential Internet access method for ordinary people, but also a lot of intelligence devices select WiFi as the networking method.

Unlike mobile phones and computers with rich human-computer interaction interfaces, most smart devices do not have a keyboard and cannot directly configure network parameters. At this time, a convenient configuration technology-SmartConfig was born. This technology was originally proposed by Texas Instruments (TI), and has since been rapidly developed.

Scenes

When both smart device A and smart phone B are within the signal coverage of router C and device A is in a free state, smart device A can be added to router C's network through SmartConfig technology.

Principle

As we all know, when network devices such as mobile phones are connected to the router, you need to select the target WiFi and enter the correct WiFi password. However, smart devices usually do not have a keyboard and a screen and cannot be manually entered.

The wireless signal of the router is usually encrypted. Common encryption methods are WEP, WPA_PSK, WPA2_PSK, WPA_WPA2_PSK. When the device does not establish a connection with the router, it cannot resolve the data packets sent by the router.

The structure of the user data area of the UDP message application layer is shown below

Although the device in the free state cannot resolve the "user data", the "total length of the user data area" in the packet header can still be obtained correctly (the device needs to enable promiscuous mode). Therefore, through several packets of UDP data, you can encode the WiFi SSID and Password information in the length area. As long as the device receives a UDP packet that meets the encoding rules, it can parse out the correct WiFi information and can access the router.

Advantage

Smartconfig uses UDP packets to transmit information and does not need to establish an effective connection, so it is easy to operate.

This technology theoretically supports all network devices, and as a general configuration mobile phone, whether it is open Android or closed IOS, it can be supported.

Compared with the method of opening an AP on the device and reconfiguring the mobile phone to access the AP, Smartconfig APP development does not require excessive system permissions. Especially for the IOS system, the operation of opening the AP is extremely complicated.

The technology also supports the scenario where a smart phone is configured with multiple smart devices at the same time.

Note

At present, most smart devices with WiFi solutions cannot support special characters, such as Chinese, ",", ":", "\", etc. Therefore, special characters must be avoided in WiFi names and passwords.

To use Smartconfig, you need to check the device manual to understand whether the device's working frequency band is 2.4GHz or 5GHz. It is recommended that the mobile phone be connected to the same frequency band as the device for configuration.

Due to the need for UDP communication in the local area network, the router needs to turn off the "user isolation" function, and some routers are also called "AP isolation".

In the 2.4G/5GHz dual-band integration scenario, some routers are currently tested. Whether the mobile phone is connected to the router through 2.4G or 5G, it can be configured, but it does not mean that all routers can support it.

YTL's APS WiFi communication smart prepaid electricity meter also supports SmartConfig to configure the network, and only requires a smart phone to connect the smart meter to the target network. Not only can the network be configured through the APP of YTL, but also the configuration of the network can be achieved by WeChat, so that customers can be carefree.

APS pre-payment management system-is a set of Internet + new pre-payment system dedicated to the secondary rental market. Based on the IEC standard code encryption and decryption function, it realizes the sale of electricity without media, integrates collecting remote meter reading, recharge, and clear, power off and other functions in one. It can be flexibly applied to renting houses, apartments, campus dormitories, industrial parks, shopping mall shops, properties, etc., to solve a series of charging management problems for landlords or administrators. Realize self-service recharge of tenants and intelligent management of tenants.

It doesn’t matter If you are a technical noob who still can't understand the above content. If you use a YTL router, your WiFi communication smart meter does not need to configure the network, just connect the 220V power supply to the router. Moreover, this type of router adopts Qualcomm enterprise router chip solution, with 128MB dual-channel large memory, which can simultaneously support the stable access of 128 WiFi meters.