Predrag Mijatovic's Guest Wi-Fi Is Protected, Shared by a Smart Raspberry Pi Pico QR Code Display
Designed to keep things secure yet easy-to-use, this project generates a new guest network on a schedule.
Maker Predrag Mijatovic decided to invite friends onto his guest Wi-Fi network in style — by generating QR codes for display on an OLED panel attached to a Raspberry Pi Pico.
"[This project will] display a QR code on a Raspberry Pi Pico display, so that you can join a Wi-Fi network with style," Mijatovic writes of the network-sharing effort. "Disclaimer: there are probably better ways to achieve this."
The project makes use of the ability to encode Wi-Fi network connection information into a two-dimensional QR code recognizable by the camera on most smartphones and tablets — including the network SSID, authentication protocol type, and password. When properly generated, the QR code allows the scanning device to immediately connect without any manual configuration.
Ordinarily, the resulting QR code would be entirely static. In Mijatovic's case, though, the project goes a stage further with dynamic generation: " it uses MikroTik router as an example, SSH-es to it, resets the guest password, and then creates a new QR code with Wi-Fi network credentials," he explains. "It also shows you how you can restart Raspberry Pi Pico without unplugging it. With few modifications you can run this script in cron and reset your guest Wi-Fi network on a schedule of your choosing."
The source code for the project, which uses a Raspberry Pi Pico and a Waveshare Pico OLED 1.3" display, is available on GitHub under an unspecified open-source license; the Raspberry Pi Pico side is written in Python, with a shell script for resetting and regenerating the guest network from a Linux device.