Connecting a Pycom board to a captive portal network

[DexTr]

Hello !

I am working on a very basic IoT project for my semester in my engineering school. It's sending sensor data from the Pysense board to a Raspberry Pi board using MQTT and then using that data on an InfluxDB database to show graphs of stuff like temperatures, pressure etc.

Me and my classmates have completed the project, but I want to push it a step further. The only problem is, I can only work in my apartment, which is in a student complex with free Wifi, the kind that requires you to go through a login page and enter an email address and password before being allowed Internet access.

So my question is, is there a way to be able to log the Wipy board on this captive portal ? And if so, what do I need to put in the wlan.connect() arguments ?

Thanks for answering !

[Gijs]

Hi,
That really depends on how the captive portal works. If it is a WPA2-Enterprise system, you could check the code here: https://docs.pycom.io/tutorials/networks/wlan/#connecting-to-a-wpa2-enterprise-network
If it is a basic captive portal over http, you could record and mimic the response your computer sends to such a captive portal and create that in a socket on the Pycom board. I imagine you would be able to connect to the WLAN network just fine and get DHCP confirmation, but then always get redirected through the logon page.

Im not here to advise you on how to exploit such systems though, so be careful and do not violate the terms and services.