Provisioning IoT Devices via Mobile Phone Flashlight

Device Provisioning or Configuration is one of the hardest phase of IoT device development due to user interactivity. Wi-Fi powered IoT device vendors mostly prefer to switch device to AP mode to provide user credentials to the IoT device. But the companion mobile apps would lack of user experiences.

Not only AP mode supported configuration is available, also some vendors provide smart configuration by manipulating Wi-Fi frame target addresses.

In this project, it is aimed to create another smart configuration method to send network credentials to the IoT devices for initial configuration phase. These network credentials are encoded into mobile phone flashlight beams.

To implement the system, I made an mobile to manipulate mobile phone flashlight based on OOK modulation. That's too basic; if there is a light, it means one, else it is a zero.

Here is the video of the running system:

The received light pattern in IoT device is converted into bit-streams and network credentials get available in ASCII fashion.

Of course, there are several improvements needed like clock sync, adding some preambles and error check.

Notice that, this method will not have a legality problem like patent infraction when compared to other smart methods. And it's open source, check out my GitHub to get both mobile and device code.

Have fun with it!