At this level, you’re most likely mindful that you’ll be able to retailer your wi-fi community’s credentials in a QR code, so that anybody who desires to hook up with their smartphone want best scan the 2D barcode. Whether or not you print it out on paper, extrude it out of plastic, or paint the object at the wall, it nonetheless works the similar. It’s a neat trick for while you’ve were given family and friends over, and saves you having to give an explanation for your ponderously lengthy WPA key.
However what if you wish to alternate up the encryption key each so steadily? Certain could be a trouble to need to repaint the wall. Input this attention-grabbing challenge from [Predrag Mijatovic], which makes use of a couple of scripts to mechanically arrange a brand new encrypted visitor WiFi community and provide the fitting QR code on an OLED show connected to a Raspberry Pi Pico. It’s slightly convoluted, and nearly undoubtedly gained’t paintings to your community with out vital tweaks, however we’re intrigued by means of the speculation.
As [Predrag] explains, the entire thing is in accordance with a Latvian MikroTik router that may be configured over SSH. A Bash script generates a brand new encryption key by means of base64 encoding the output /dev/urandom, logs into the router to arrange a brand new community the use of it, after which generates the matching ASCII QR code. With some sed trickery, the code is then embedded right into a MicroPython program that will get uploaded to the attached Pi Pico.
Within the video after the ruin [Predrag] takes us throughout the procedure manually so it’s more straightforward to peer what’s happening. Underneath commonplace cases, it will all occur mechanically and would take only some seconds to finish. We’d really feel extra at ease if the scripts had some error correction that will let them gracefully go out if one thing is going unsuitable, however as an explanation of thought, it undoubtedly works.
We’d like to peer this idea explored slightly additional, in all probability the use of one of the vital bodily QR code presentations we’ve noticed over time. A programmable digital paper show would even be a logical option to blow their own horns a dynamic QR code.