I don't know this is the right place to talk about 3rd party developed product or not. If it is not, please move this thread to another subforum.
Anyway, here are what I get after several months’ coding and prototyping.
- A dongle, which user could plug in his PC, which will be enumerated as a virtual com port device. I have it worked on Windows 7 and Ubuntu. It acts as a gateway between the dongle and an Arduino variant. The dongle contains a 32bit STM32 microcontroller, a NRF24L01+ and a RF frontend chip named RFX2401C. There is also a piece of similar hardware on the Arduino variant to do the same job.
- An Arduino variant.
Here is what I can do with the dongle and the Arduino variant.
- The Atmel328p is loaded with Arduino UNO’s bootloader. I can download sketches via the dongle to the Arduino variant. Just select a port and do as I am using an original Arduino UNO.
- I can use the serial monitor to debug my sketch.
- I tested the hardware with Standard Firmata, and it worked pretty well.
- RF transceiving power is about 0.1W. I have not tested the range of the communication, based on experience it may work at 1Km line of sight..
Here is something about the future.
- I reserved an I2C slave port on the MCU located on the Arduino variant. I am going to use it as a communication channel to interact with Atmel328p. The Arduino variant could use this interface to transmit or receive NRF24L01+ packet.
- One dongle could be paired to one Arduino variant at the same time. I am going to add the ability to let the dongle to be paired to multiple Arduino variants simultaneously.
- A product wiki.
OK, those are what I want to show you. If you are interested and what to know more details, just reply to the thread.
Preliminary Datasheet:
http://netdrive.envell.com/pic/ebay/ADA-000200/AIR-000200_Datasheet_V1.0.pdf