Hi all,
I'm currently in the process of doing some marketing research on the viability of a 802.11b WiFi Arduino shield. It would be a plug-n-play solution to an Arduino Duemilanove or Diecimila. I'm trying to get feedback and gauge interest in such a part, so any help would be greatly appreciated!
I currently have a working prototype shield that employs 802.11b, up to 2 mbps, works in both infrastructure and adhoc mode, and has a relatively decent range without the need for an external whip antenna. A lot of work has gone into the wireless module to make it low power, so it would be a great fit to a battery powered Arduino project.
There would be some caveats to using the shield and driver code as-is in the beginning, however. First off, anything less than an ATMEGA168 (16K flash, 1K SRAM) unfortunately won't cut it due to the size of the driver and small TCP/IP stack sitting on top. We are projecting about 5-6K or space for user code in the ATMEGA168. We might be able to shoehorn it into a smaller device, but it wouldn't leave much room, if any, for user content. ATMEGA328s would be ideal due to the doubling of space. Packets would also need to be fairly small due to the restriction of SRAM space. We think you should still be able to do small things like blink remote leds, get temperature sensor readings and the like, but you definitely won't be able to stream 720p video content (maybe in the next revision! ). I've been told by my WiFi module supplier that things will be changing later this year to remove the "small" packet requirement. When this happens, we expect to be able to move full-sized packets over the air.
Initially, we are hoping to sell the WiFi shield in the range of $50-$80, intermixed with all the ZigBee and Bluetooth modules that are out there. The price really depends on you! If there is enough interest, even with the caveats I mentioned, it would help me tremendously to put pressure on my supplier to give me better pricing.
So please let me know if you are interested, and give me any feedback you may have. If there are any questions, I'll try and answer those as best I can in this thread. If all goes well, I'm hoping to have a solution in the market sometime in April.
Thanks!
AsyncLabs