IoT WiFi vs Bluetooth: Setup

As promised, some more food for thoughts on Bluetooth vs WiFi (as they still seem to be the most discussed IoT protocols today). Today the post is about the first encounters, or the setup process.

So you've just bought a new connected device. It is in a so called factory state. You want to connect to it. What does it take with WiFi? The goal is to connect it as a client to your WiFi network. To do this, you have tell the device your WiFi password. Of course this can weaken your WiFi security, but let's skip this issue for a moment. So how do you tell a lamp your WiFi password? You could if you connected, but you cannot connect until you tell the password... Chicken and egg. There are several techniques to do this, all of them problematic. The most common today (used by Belkin WeMo among others) is a device in a factory state creates it's own network. So you navigate to your WiFi settings, search for new networks, select the right one form the usually long list and your phone is connected to the lamp. You tell it the SSID and password and it reboots, trying to connect. Your phone drops the connection and tries to reconnect back to the home WiFi. If it succeeds, it may assume the lamp is on the same WiFi now. But again, how do you find it - what is the IP address of the lamp? There are a number of discovery protocols to help. The lamp may either use Intel's UPnP or Apple's mDNS (aka Bonjour) or yet another type of network - wide broadcast to announce itself. These protocols often do their job but not always. Good if the phone finally finds the lamp. But what if it does not? I notoriously have this problem with WeMos: the setup seems to go smoothly until the device reboots and then I can never see it again. The only thing I can do is bring it back to the factory state with a long press of a button and try again. I've no clue what the problem really is, but it happens very often.

Another approach is to use other means of communication (other than WiFi) to tell the lamp the WiFi password. Both Revolv and Wink use smoke signals (light flashes) to transmit the password to the device. Again, sometimes it works, sometimes it does not. I spent a full day trying to set up the Egg Minder and all I was getting was a red flashing light, meaning it did not connect. After several days of investigation we found the Wink Android app was unable blink the light in a way the Egg Minder could understand. Ultimately we st it up with an iPhone.

Lots, lots of hassles, most of them in the very first crucial seconds. Wonder how many customers are simply giving up? This is by the way exactly why Mark Rolston claims The Future Of Smart Things Is Dumb. "Spending precious time tending and grooming our smart things just isn’t smart, and people won’t put up with it much longer. We need to move to the next generation where we take the computers out of computing and integrate these experiences into our natural world.". So true.

So what about Bluetooth then? Well... I think with our Seed Control App we have just solved exactly this problem: the setup process couldn't be easier - it almost does not exist. This is our promise. You can start controlling the devices in no time. The iPhone version is coming this month. And so are the first Seed - powered devices. I think the WiFi supporters should give us a try.