Hotspot

Inspiration

Jess and I were at Banff with the rest of her family and were getting set up with the WiFi at our cabin. There was a slip of paper with the wifi SSID and password. We all had to manually connect one by one till one of us thought about what if there was an app that could just read the wifi credentials and connect to it.

What it does

It captures an Image and best analyzes the SSID and password from the text. It allows the user to modify the information if it didn't get it 100% before connecting.

How we built it

We built it on Android using a pre trained OCR (optical character recognition) engine (https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract). We capture an image using the phones camera and push it throw the engine and receive raw text on the other end. The text retains it's vertical structure using new line characters. We then naively parse that text to pull out what we think is the closest match to the SSID and password. We then programmatically connect to the Wi-Fi network using that data.

Challenges we ran into

Since this app assumes you are not connected to the internet we wanted to avoid the use of cloud based OCR services. This constraint caused us to use a local engine which must be supplied with training data. We didn't have time to train the engine so we resorted to data provided by the library maintainer. The training data provided was very small and would cause the engine to stumble on fairly simple character distinctions.