8.3 Set-up and commissioning
8.3.1 Pairing, bonding, association
The addition of wireless means that you will either need to find a way of pairing to the correct device, or else pre-pair devices and deliver them as a matched pair. As a result, it is almost inevitable that the act of adding wireless to a product means that a user interface will need to be rewritten, to provide options for the product to connect to another wireless unit or access point. However simple the connection, that modification should be used to schedule all of the wireless-related firmware changes, including any protocol conversion, rather than vice versa. In an ideal world, devices would have enough intelligence to know what to connect to and when to do it. Unfortunately they don’t, so designers need to add the ability for them to display a list of potential devices to which they could connect and allow the user to decide what to do. They may also want to provide the option for the user to select the security level for the current and subsequent connections. This interface is generally beyond the scope of the standard and relies on the ingenuity of the product designer. It does, however, use tools provided by the standards. From a user perspective, it affects the usability of a product, perception of thebrand, and in the case of commercial installations, the cost of ownership of the product. Despite the importance of all of these, it is frequently still done appallingly poorly. As we’ve seen before, it’s not the standard that dictates how well this can be achieved, as all that the standard does is to provide the toolkit for designing connection schemes. Often the problem is that the user interface is designed by engineers who understand how the wireless connection and infrastructure works and forget that the eventual user does not. To design a satisfactory interface, the designer needs to consider how the product is likely to be used, where those connections will need to be made and by whom, how often the process will be done and how to recover when it goes wrong.