Pairing without physical access

General
1

Is it possible to connect two or more HaLowLink 1s together without having physical access to press the mode button on both them? Can you use a preshared key in the configuration of both of them?

We have a situation where physical access on the extender side is problematic.

2

There are lots of ways to do this, but it would be good to understand more of the constraints.

You can trigger DPP from the interface itself if you have network access. But I’m assuming that you’re using HL1 to give you network access in the first place, so without being paired this won’t help much! On the other hand, at some point you have to be able to interact with the device, so …

The simplest thing to do is probably pair them in advance as then they will store the key and won’t have to be paired again. Or, as you say, you could just set the ssid/key on the Extender independently if the AP is deployed separately; the easiest way to do that is to use the static recovery IP (see the FAQ in the guide), access the user interface, and click the ‘X’ on the uplink card on the home page to configure the ssid/key.

1 Like
3

Thanks for the response James.

There’s two scenarios I can think of that would be good to cover.

  1. You’ve got a new client device in a workshop and want to preconfigure it so you can just turn it on later and it will connect to an existing access point
  2. You want to replace an existing access point (with a spare) and want the N existing clients to connect to the spare without changes

As you say we are expecting to have access to the devices at some stage - either via a wired connection or ‘classic’ Wi-Fi. It is good to know we can trigger the pairing process but it sounds like configuring the SSID & key in advance is the way to go. I just could not find any instructions on doing this within the manual.

4

Re (1), yes, I agree, you should preconfigure the SSID/key via the recovery IP, though it’s also possible to leave it in AP mode and configure it via the Quick Config page.

The reason it’s not in the manual is largely because we were trying to keep it simple and avoid people having to access the interface on the Extender (which is more technically difficult). We also hoped that the ‘Extender’ mode would be a quick demo of HaLow for those who didn’t have access to another device; in the longer term, we anticipate the primary role of the HaLowLink 1 is as an AP.

With scenario (2), I would recommend giving the new AP the same SSID/key as the old one to avoid needing to individually update each client.