Faceless sensors and tiny routers needed for the Internet of things | Hacker News Reader

Faceless sensors and tiny routers needed for the Internet of things

money.cnn.com

15 pointstdrnd6 comments

I stopped reading after

The Co-founder of ThingSquare, Adam Dunkels, developed Contiki a programming language designed for connecting and communication between sensors.

Contiki is an operating system, not a programming language. In the article the name is linked to the main site at http://contiki-os.org/, which has OS in the URL and which also says "The Open Source OS for the Internet of Things" on the very front page very prominently.

Also, the quoted sentence above seems mis-edited to me, "for connecting and communication" should be "for connecting and communicating with" or something.

Still, sounds like an interesting "vector" for internet of things, to rely on smart phones as a "free" component providing screen and input.

Whenever I think of a possible new hardware device, (which inevitably involves it being connected to the internet!) my first thought is: how will the UI of connecting to wifi work? Most often with a lot of devices, "setup" == "connecting to wifi", so having an easy way to do this using a standard smartphone based UI is a very interesting idea.

Allowing faceless connections to wifi networks could allow for a new range of small, screenless devices, or at least devices with smaller screens and reduced interaction.

I have a simple idea for that: if your device has both Wi-Fi and Ethernet, then if you plug the device into the network via the Ethernet port it should immediately request and receive the Wi-Fi configuration. My premise here is that if you have physical access to the network, then you can just reset the router and change all the passwords anyway. Of course this would only be on by default for home routers, etc.

I just had to go through this madness with a wireless printer and it was not fun. A simple zeroconf protocol would solve this very nicely for a lot of devices.

Maybe something like bluetooth pairing could work for wifi. Eg you would press a button on the device, and it would broadcast a "request to join network" message. Then you could authorize the request on your access points/routers interface. Passcodes could be added for better security (to ensure that the device doesn't attach to your neighbors network).

There is a mechanism called WiFi Protected Setup (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_Protected_Setup) that does something similar, but none of the home routers I've personally used have had this feature. There is a mandatory push-button mode in there.

Yeah, on a closer reading one mode of WPS sounds like it would fit the bill. Too bad that it has also the major security hole mode ("enter AP PIN on device" mode). Hopefully that can be selectively disabled and eventually deprecated.

edit: Whats in WPS 2.0? There are some references to it, mainly saying that it could fix the security issues in WPS. But I couldn't find any solid info how it would to that.

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