A customer would like to build a mobile BLE to WiFi gateway. I was thinking about Electric Imp but they would like the WiFi to connect automatically to any available WiFi close by and securely talk to the IMP server for procesing. Is this possible?
Short answer is yes. You’d need to execute a scan to check what open networks are in range. Even if the network is listed as open , you may not be able to connect to it. The imp can’t handle splash pages. If the imp sees multiple open networks, you’d need to step through them, attempting a connection.
If you go to an airport or hotel for example, when you connect to their “free WiFi”, you use your browser. A web page opens where you view their terms and ‘agree’ to connect. This is called “captive WiFi”. That’s what @coverdriven means by “splash pages”. The imp cannot connect to captive WiFi.
To be clear, one reason why the imp can’t connect to these is that there’s no way a device could read and agree to legal provisions.
With the agreement of the hotspot owner you could do this, eg they could whitelist imp mac addresses and destination ports so they wouldn’t need to login.