My company has been working on making some devices that utilize Wi-Fi to be able to connect a device to the internet to view status and allow a device to be remotely controlled. One stumbling block that we have come up against is that on the app side (iOS and Andriod), the way our application has been developed it requires our device to work as an access point mode and then requires the user to jump out of our application, into their phone settings and then make different Wi-Fi setting changes. What we have seen from various other products (in their setup process), is that devices seem to use some form of Bluetooth connection to share credentials that makes the user’s experience much more simple. (The user doesn’t have to leave the app and then switch to the device in access point mode and insert credentials.) We don’t know if there is a specific term for this type of setting up Wi-Fi functionality utilizing an existing side channel Bluetooth connection.
As an example of a use case, if you have an Amazon Echo (or Alexa) and are trying to set it up to get it working on the internet, your phone will direct you to make sure Bluetooth is on when performing the setup. We experimented with getting several other devices on to Wi-Fi and found that most of the time the phone asks that Bluetooth be enabled to perform the setup.
Our existing Wi-Fi devices only have a ATWINC module for making the Wi-Fi connectivity. We are unsure what the requirement would be to allow us to use an additional Bluetooth interface to ease the Wi-Fi connection issues. If anyone knows of any information that can be shared for helping us figure out how we can utilize Bluetooth for performing the Wi-Fi setup, we would be extremely appreciative.
Thanks.
