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Recently I purchased a TP-Link HS100 smart plug which I configured using an app and all is working well. Now I am trying to understand the underlying software and hardware architecture for such an implementation. Based on simple Google searches, the following is my understanding.

The headless smart plug makes a peer to peer connection to a device such as a mobile phone or computer. Using a device with a UI, network configurations are entered into the IoT device. The IoT device then connects to the access point to make some type of authentication with a cloud service, and establishes a connection. The mobile app communicates the commands to the cloud service which then relays the command to the smart plug. This is pretty straightforward.

I like to understand a little bit deeper in both software and hardware architecture for this type of design. It is fair say that there is some type of Wi-Fi device like the CC3100 Wi-Fi chip or similar. There is some type of microcontroller like an ARM Cortex. It could be an integrated Wi-Fi controller such as a CC3200.

What is the underlying software and hardware architecture to implement such a design to setup and establish a secure communication link? What type of minimum security needs to be implemented to secure the device? I am hoping someone on this site has experience with such an adaptation (2.4 GHz) and is willing to share their experience.

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    Check out this blog post for a lot of information about the newer HS110: softscheck.com/en/reverse-engineering-tp-link-hs110
    – Helmar ♦
    Dec 17, 2016 at 16:33
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    Well, you're going to have: power, Wi-Fi and a controller on a PCB, and some software code to go with it, and that makes it do what it does.
    – Paul
    Jan 5, 2017 at 18:22

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One of the underlying software and hardware architectures you can use to implement such a design is:

Arduino core for ESP8266 WiFi chip

It is based in a low cost single chip solution and it can use WPA2 for security.

On the server side you can use SSL/TLS. Check thinger.io arduino libraries 2.5+

For the server side you can also use thinger.io.

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  • Note that you can also run MicroPython on the ESP8266. That has a number of benefits, one being that it's a lot easier than C/++, unless you are already fluent in C/++.
    – Petri
    Jan 8, 2017 at 16:52

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