6 Demo Application

The WILCS02 demo application acts as a Wi-Fi® soft AP (SSID is microchip-SoftAP) for other station devices like PCs or mobile phones to connect upon its start to run. A web server is running in the application. The users can connect their station devices like PCs or mobile phones to the WILCS02 soft AP and perform network provisioning by providing the input of the target AP’s SSID and pass-phase through a webpage. After performing the network provisioning, the board changes to Station mode to connect to the target AP in the network. The Light Emitting Diode (LED) on the host Memory Protection Unit (MPU) evaluation board blinks blue when it is connecting to the network in Station mode and turns solid blue when it successfully connects to the network. The Secure Shell (SSH) and Multicast Domain Name System (mDNS) features are enabled, allowing the users to remotely log in to the platform using the platform’s host name for evaluation. The users can also access the console of the evaluation board for further evaluation.

The demo uses the following components:

WILCS02’s AP mode: Enables clients to connect and configure home AP credentials.
WILCS02’s STA mode: Connects the board to the AP in the target network.
hostapd application: Configures the WILCS02 Module to soft AP mode. Handles the connections from different stations (STA)
wpa_supplicant: Configure the WILCS02 Module as Station mode to connect to the Wi-Fi networks, handle authentication and encryption.
DHCP server: Distributes IP addresses to all the connected clients (STA’s).
NGINX web server: Hosts the web server which lets the user to provide the target AP credentials.
websocket application: Acts as a Common Gateway Interface (CGI) function to receive the credential information from web server.
sshd: This process enables secure remote access to the WILCS02 Module via SSH protocol.
avahi: Enables the mDNS device discovery and hostname resolution for SSH remote connection with hostname instead of IP address.