WiFiManager, can't see iPhone personal hotspot in SSID scan w/Captive Portal

Need Help With My Project
1

I am using the basic example “OnDemandConfigPortal” from //https://github.com/tzapu/WiFiManager. Code is working as expected except that the list of SSIDs that is scanned and displayed on the Captive Portal does not include the very SSID I want - the iPhone’s own personal hotspot SSID. This is key to my app as I am connecting the Blynk HW device to the Internet via the iPhone’s own hotspot. Has anyone gotten this to work? What else do I need to do to include the personal hotspot on the list of SSIDs? Thanks!

2

I don’t think the iPhone can work as a hotspot whilst connected to the WiFi of the captive portal. The workaround would be to use a second phone/tablet/laptop to connect to the captive portal whilst still keeping the hotspot running on your phone.

However, I really don’t see the logic in what you’re doing. Why not hardcode some random SSID and password into your MCU then use the credentials when creating the hotspot on your phone?
You would obviously need to hardcode the auth code as well, which may be why you want to use WiFiManager in the first place.

Pete.

3

Another one would be to still use WiFi Manager and just add the phones credentials without scanning if other wifi-enabled electronics aren’t available.

4

Hi Pete, thanks for your suggestions! I may have not made myself clear in my use case. What I really am trying to do is a kind of WiFi provisioning, using the smartphone’s own (the hotspot) SSID and passcode. Since my app will be used by multiple users whose smartphone credentials are unknown, I simply want to make it easier for them to (a) startup the app, (b) get the capture portal from wifi manager, and © have the top choice in the scan list be the phone’s own (again, hotspot) SSID. Of course, a user can type all of this in him/herself, but I was trying to be clever and make it a bit easier to get going. Seems to me there ought to be a simple way to get this information (other than IOS SDK) via Blynk.

5

I don’t think that there is any way to do this other than have two mobile devices - one to provide the hotspot and the other to access the captive portal. This is because - as I said before - I don’t think that it’s possible for most (if any) Moble devices to act as a mobile data to hotspot device at the same time as connecting to a WiFi network and access the captive portal.

Back to the drawing board I think.

Pete.