A couple of weekends ago I wanted to complete a small, achievable mini-project. My chosen focus area: guest WiFi.

I wanted to keep guest clients isolated from the rest of my network, but also make it easier for guests to log in to my home WiFi.

Creating a guest SSID

Until now, my approach to guests on my home network has been… admittedly quite relaxed. I’ve allowed guests to simply authenticate to my main SSID without a second thought, granting them unfettered access to my entire network. It was time to change that.

To configure my Unifi U7 Pro Max access point, I used the Unifi management tool deployed locally on my Linux desktop via Docker. I decided against using a captive portal for guest clients to log in through, as that would scupper my plans to play with NFC and add another unnecessary barrier for guests. Instead, I opted to create a normal SSID with a randomly-generated password and enabled “Client Device Isolation”:

A few minutes later and we have a guest wifi SSID! 🎊

Writing credentials to an NFC tag

Typing in passwords is a pain, even when using a somewhat memorable passphrase. The solution: NFC! Having guests simply tap their phones on an NFC tag to connect is a much easier, less irritating way to log in to a WiFi network.

I bought some cheap NFC sticker tags on AliExpress. And I mean cheap - they were only a few pennies each. To programme them, I used an Android app called NFC Tools to write my new WiFi credentials to one of the tags using my phone, which only took a few seconds.

The finished product

Now that I had a working NFC tag, it was time to make it pretty by printing and laminating a sign with the sticker inside:

Works a treat.

This was a fun, satisfying, and easy project to complete in a few minutes and I’ll definitely be making more of these to place throughout the house.