Emoji SSIDs! [ Edited ]

[kazdegroot]

I've been very enamored with the Unifi product line, but as I am also very fond of the emoji in my SSID I was sorta bummed that that wasn't supported.

Given some other mentions, however, that the spec itself should support it, having gotten it working on every other router i've found, and the knowledge it atleast partially worked in some previous version, I decided to dig in.

tl;dr: it works! but requires some effort.

First:

Getting emoji in the interface

While the contoller interface uses some validation to prevent entering emoji, the actual configuration is stored in mongo db, so using an SSH tunnel to connect to the mongodb on the controller at 127.0.0.1:27117 allows direct modification of the config. By altering the name in the documents in the wlanconf collection, a refresh in the controller will show your sweet new emoji name. Just know that you can't change the settings without changing the name back, so any network changes will require temporarily changing your ssid back to something boring while saving the rest of your changes, then changing the name directly in mongodb.

If your emoji's codepoint (check e.g. emojipedia.org) is below U+FFFF, that should be it. Force provisioning of the wlan info to your ap's, and you should be in business. 

If, however, you want to use a 🍆, 🚀 or 🤓, they have a codepoint higher than U+FFFF, and your SSID becomes a weird garble of characters, that you can't connect to. Thus:

How to fix the other emoji:

While the hex representation of 🍆 is 'F0 9F 8D 86', there is an alternative, non UTF compliant, variant: 'ed a0 bc ed bd 86'. Though the system.cfg for the AP's in /var/lib/unify/ap/[mac] has the correct binary code for the emoji, the version on the AP has the alternative, 6 octet one. Thus something seems to go wrong in transport. If, however, you 'fix' the system.cfg on device, and rerun all the config and setup scripts, the emoji work! So ideally, Ubnt fix this transport error, and just remove the filter from the ui, but until then, I've added a little script to /usr/etc/rc.d/rc that replaces the wrong code for the emoji I use, with the correct one. The command boils down to:

LC_ALL='C' sed 's/old/new/g' system.cfg > tmp.fixemoji; mv tmp.fixemoji  system.cfg

And then I used a hexeditor to replace old and new with respectively the faulty, 6 octet, code and the correct 4 octet one. By now this has survived a few (test) provisions, and the networks, work fine.

Hope this helps someone, and/or provides enough information that Ubnt can fix this in a future release.

EDIT:

Made a little script that takes some emoji, checks if the fix is needed, and if so, creates a file that does the fix:

https://gitlab.com/kazdegroot/unifi-emoji

[ansysic]

Hi,

I found the manual of kazdegroot helpful but a bit outdated, so I made a quick and dirty tutorial. Inserting emojis via Unifi Controller is now possible, but the transfer from mongodb to each AP messes things up while provisioning.

In the next few steps we are going to setup a second wifi network, download the configuration file of each AP, manually replace the SSID string with emojis and upload the config back onto the APs.

My Unifi Controller runs on Debian (raspberrypi). Tested on Build: atag_5.3.11_8935

1. Create a second wifi network in controller settings called "TEST123"
2. SSH into a linux machine in same subnet (here: my Unifi Controller)
3. From there we download the config of each Unifi AP

   1. //scp username@IP:/tmp/system.cfg LOCALFILE
      scp admin@192.168.100.115:/tmp/system.cfg system.cfg

4. Edit the system.cfg file via editor of choice. I personally used Notepad++ on Windows. Search for "TEST123" string and replace it via copy paste with emojis. You can find them at http://getemoji.com/ for example. The finished result looks like this:
   
   1. 
5. Upload modified config back to Unifi AP

6. //scp LOCALFILE username@IP:/tmp/system.cfg
   scp system.cfg admin@192.168.100.115:/tmp/system.cfg

7. SSH info Unifi AP and save config to flash via "save" command

8. ssh admin@192.168.100.115
   
   BZ.v3.7.37# save
   Found  Active on[1] ...
   Found Backup1 on[2] ...
   Storing Active[2] ... [%100]
   Active->Backup[1] ... [%100]

9. Reboot Unifi AP via controller webgui
10. Profit 
    1. 

[motadom]

I was looking for this a couple of week ago. I will try it and give you my feedback.

[kazdegroot]

Honestly, this is kinda way too much work for what is mostly decoration, but especially given what the fixes actually do, it seems this would take very little work to fix if you had access to the actual provisioning code.

So it would be great if someone fron UBNT could look into that.

[motadom]

---

@kazdegroot wrote:

Honestly, this is kinda way too much work for what is mostly decoration, but especially given what the fixes actually do, it seems this would take very little work to fix if you had access to the actual provisioning code.

So it would be great if someone fron UBNT could look into that.

---

I think the same but... it look nice! LMAO

[ruimarinho]

Definitely also looking for this one too. 😭

[ruimarinho]

The feature request is at: https://community.ubnt.com/t5/UniFi-Feature-Requests/Allow-emoji-characters-to-be-used-in-wireless-n...

[Canuck]

So, there's a much easier way to do this if your Unicode character is of the earlier vintage, as per kazdegroot's findings.

Instead of having to modify the database directly, or update the config on each UAP manualy, you can just add the symbol through the UniFi app.

I've tested this on iOS, and while I could not use a country flag as the SSID (came out garbled), I was able to use the coffee emoji ☕ successfully.

This is easiest to test out if you have another SSID to connect to; then you can keep modifying/testing out emojis until you get one you like that works with minimal fuss.

Looking forward to full Unicode support though!

[CatTarian]

Where's the gag me with a pitchfork emoji, and what does it look like on a text-only device? Yeesh.

[edekkers]

really? just, really?

[djkevino]

I deleted my emoji SSIDs after windows bluescreens when scanning for wifi. A really fun one to debug. Don't know if it has been fixed bij MS

[yz30]

After many tests... override diverse SSID

and copy from this
❤️ =OK
☕ =OK

[kazdegroot]

You can check if the emoji works by checking the codepoint on emojipedia; if the part after 0x is four characters, it'll work.