Itās not designed for security. Itās designed for convenience. And itās only for your guest WiFi so itās not like your LANās compromised.
I think most people have a barcode/QRcode scanner. Shouldnāt be a problem.
Bottom line, if you have a vacation house or many visitors coming to your primary residence, this saves you telling everybody your guest WiFi PW one-by-one.
The default camera app in the last two major Android updates and iOS have had the ability to scan QR codes for at least the last two years. This is what we used for our referral codes at makerfaire a couple of years ago.
The MagicMirror post I did a while back also uses a QR code for the guest wifi, but since this is a screen and not static- I can rotate the SSID and the password from time to time. But as @Tom_A said. This is a convenience feature.
Yup. This was my ābenchmarkā for the guest wifi- If your device was not fairly updated (with-in 2 years) I donāt want it on my network. VLANād or not.
I installed Lens, but I couldnāt get it to work in the native camera app. I came across this XDA article that suggests this is a Pixel thing, not a general Android thing.
@Tom_A, I didnāt know it was embedded either. Using a Moto G5+ and in settings I could turn on Google Lens. Must have been part of the OS since I have never installed it. Worked just fine. Just pointed the camera at a barcode or QR and it comes back a couple seconds with the info. I had been using a QR reader that I manually installed.
Edit: My wife knew the capability was there. Iām the Electrical/Software Engineer and sheās the Theatrical Arts Major. Go figure.
My bet is Samsung disabled that setting in favor of Bixby Vision (which does scan QR codes in the native camera). But since nobody actually uses Bixby, all theyāve done is crippled the feature.
Not to take anything away from the OP engrave, which is very coolā¦ I just wonder a bit about using QR codes like this.
If itās not security measure, then wouldnāt a sign with the ssid and password in plaintext be more convenient, since it would work for everyone without any fuss?
I mean you could still QR it too ā there is nothing stopping you from having both the QR and plaintext on the same sign ā but QR isnāt widely adopted even now, and I generally donāt want to load QR codes in case they take me to some site I donāt want to visit.
Anyhoo. Nice engrave anyway, and nicely done to enhance the contrast.
Open your camera/qrcode app and hold the phone up to the QR code for a second vs opening settings, WiFi settings, searching for the SSID and entering the PW one character at a time. Seems to me like the former is considerably more convenient. But certainly thatās subjective.
Weāre definitely in offtopic territory here, but Iāll agree to your point with the following caveats:
QR is more convenient ā¦ if the target person knows how to use them. And if they are using ios 11+ or have spent the time installing a reader properly in android/ios <=10. And if they trust QR codes. Thatās a lot of ifs.
SSID and PW are almost certainly more familiar to more peopleā¦ that is, I am willing to bet that the set of people who know how to do with with QR codes is wholly contained by the set of people who know how to use an SSID and password. It just seems like at least including SSID and PW next to the QR would get the most bang for the buck. If you love QR codes, have at it, but for the rest (majority?) of us, the connection criteria are there as well.
I donāt think I love them. I just think theyāre extremely convenient. For example, my business cards have one for my website and one for my e-mail address. Under each code I have those each spelled out as well. When Iām at pretty much any museum there are QR codes at the displays to ālearn more.ā I think Best Buy has them on all of their price tags. I dunno, but Iām pretty sure QR codes are rather widely acceptedā¦ not just for some fringe group.