Feeling interest for a WiFi shield

The host driver actually will only store the keys. There is a supplicant on the module which will take care of the security.

It's good to see that options are popping up (even though one of them is by me!). I needed a Wifi shield a while ago and was honestly surprised that it didn't exist.

I am thinking add wifi to homeeasy remote controls...
I want one when it is available. please keep us updated.

Sign me up also as someone who's interested.

Here's my wish list:

  • wpa etc.. as others have said this is a requirement for most networks
  • TCP/IP software interface.. Ideally something that just extends the existing Ethernet software interface. Basically if I can open a port and send things down and read them serially then I am a happy camper.
  • ability to hard reset (or turn off entirely) the device via a digital pin. I think the vast majority of projects don't need a constantly on connection, rather they either poll now and then or even more often only make a request when something changes. Having the board be off during those idle periods would be nice from a power point of view. Also, being able to do a hard reset is always handy.
  • cost. If you are talking ~$50 then sign me up, that's an awesome price point. Definitely can't be over $100.
  • obviously shield format is always nice.
  • 802.11g would be REALLY nice, since the entire network has to back down to b once a b device connects, and most people have g in their homes these days. I could be ok not having this if we have the ability to turn it off when its not actively sending.

That's my list, looking forward to it!

Sorry I haven't been on the thread in a while. It was a busy weekend! :slight_smile: Thanks for all the great input. Here are some thoughts I have on what my solution will have:

  • definitely support for wep and wpa encryption, so it should work seamlessly on all existing networks
  • we will definitely have some type of ethernet interface. We are putting some more thought into making the interface as easy as possible.
  • hard reset via a push button will be on the shield. This will reset both the arduino and the wifi shield. Alternatively there will be a method exposed that will do a shield reset from code.
  • we have a couple of power savings techniques in mind. We can probably support low power polling and a form of standby/disconnect for times you want to maximize battery longevity.
  • price will definitely be closer to $50 than $100. I'm trying my hardest to work my suppliers down, and hope that we'll be at the very bottom of the $50-$100 range. :slight_smile:
  • definitely will be a true shield, with the same form factor (even the fancy cuts on the side opposite the USB port). Our shield will only cover the pin portion of the arduino.
  • for now, it'll be b only. I don't have the power to change that. From a compatibility standpoint, I can see the concern of having to mix b and g together on the network. However, from a pure data standpoint, most applications of our shield won't come near the maximum throughput of even b, so there shouldn't be any concern regarding performance.

This is a rough idea of what is coming down the pipe.

Note that this is not final and is actually our engineering prototype. Things will be slightly different on our first production board. We are hoping to make a small run of these boards, get them out to people, get good feedback, and make the next revision of the board even better.

I hope to have a video up in a few days showing a demo of at least a simple web page being served that can trigger some leds to turn on and off. We have some other interesting demos we are working on as well, so you can stay tuned for that. :sunglasses:

Thanks for all the help and feedback!

AsyncLabs

Nice work.
Will you be extending the pins through to female on top so shields can be stacked?

Gordon

good job. Do you have a website or email list that I can pre-order
or get notified when it is available? thank you.

I would be extremely interested in a WiFi shield for the Arduino. I've been thinking about controlling the Arduino with an iPhone/iPod Touch both with commands and perhaps scripting.

Maybe I'm crazy, but the idea of spending 2 to 8 times (Arduino at 34, raw parts cost $10) as much $ for the shield as for the base makes me makes me think that any such application would be better served by a much more powerful and slightly more expensive microcontroller. Of course makershed is selling an OLED shield for $150, so I guess someone is buying the stuff.

I think that you will have tremendous pricing pressure; I think that what's cool about the Arduino is that at 30 bucks it can be an "impulse buy" for a lot of working engineers, and is also an affordable uC in educational settings.

Even XBee is pretty expensive once you buy both the module and the shield...

What I'd love to see is an inexpensive solution, less than $25. Just a guess but maybe using the same technology as radio TV remote controls -- those are probably produced pretty cheaply. It probably wouldn't be standards compliant so then also sell an "ethernet dongle" that converts the radio signal (coming from multiple arduinos) to IP.

About the price, I agree with vxir - it has to be reasonable for more
people to adapt it. If it costs you $10, then selling it less than $30 will
make me happy.

But if you look at ethernet shield, it is sold on sparkfun for $45, and
you could guess material cost be around $10, so sparkfun is too
agressive on the pricing ? I don't think so - it all depends on volume.
If sparkfun sells million units of this, you may even see price less than 10.
I don't need Greenspan to tell me this. LOL

I don't want to judge the price of wifi shield, market will tell.
In the other way, I am happy to see wifi shield starts to appear -
even if someone makes a shield using a $69 wifly. Our community
needs more cool staff.

I would be interested in at least one, how many of the Arduino pins are still open for use?

Dale

I agree with everybody that price is a concern, and believe me, it's heavily driving my design decisions as well as my profit margins. I want to do this project so badly that I'm willing to sacrifice the amount of money I can make just to get it out to the community.

Unfortunately, since we are only talking low volume sales, it's hard for me to get the rock bottom pricing for the components. I'm sure that if I went to a supplier with a million unit order every year for the next 3 years, they would give me a really, really good price. Trying to only purchase one or two thousand components, while still significant to me and my severely depleted savings account, is not significant to the supplier, and thus, the price isn't that great.

There are a lot of hidden costs that go into a lot of wireless devices. You have to pay money to have your device certified by the appropriate regulatory agency in multiple regions of the world. With regard to WiFi, you pay additional money to have your device WiFi certified. All these costs get included in the cost of the ASICs and modules, and are then passed down to the regular guys like you and me. Some of the bigger companies in WiFi (Atheros, Broadcom, Marvell) don't even want to talk to you or show you the spec unless you pay big money up front and are able to commit to have huge purchase orders. So that only leaves the smaller guys as being "Arduino friendly" suppliers.

Anyway, my point is not to create a sob story. I'm willing to take a hit and get my shield out for little to no gain on my end. I just hope that it's helpful to others, and that my sales funnel will turn from a drip, to a trickle, to a gushing stream later. :slight_smile: If that happens, I can guarantee there will be more useful wireless products coming out at very competitive prices.

As far as my shield, I'm hoping to have some demo videos created this week, along with more information on the operation and specifications of what you can do. I'm hoping to have the shield ready for general availability by the middle of April. And I apologize in advance if I don't get it done this week. Currently, I'm CEO, CFO, CTO, VP of Engineering, head of IT, and individual contributor for this venture, not to mention my normal full time engineering job, as well as being dad to my 18 month old running around my house at home. So bear with me and stay tuned... :sunglasses:

As far as pin count goes, my shield uses the 4 SPI lines, INT0, power and ground. All the other pins will be brought up from the Arduino for use by the end user.

I'd be interested in one if it was in the $40-$60US range.

I want to add my voice to those wanting "stacking" headers.

If you don't want to risk proliferation of models, at least offer one with no headers installed, so people can install their own: it's very likely that people would want to combine the WiFi shield with one or more others carrying sensors or outputs to be read/controlled via WiFi.

Ran

All the pins on the Arduino will be pulled up to the top, so that everybody can put whatever other sensors/dodads/gizmos on top without having to whip out the soldering iron. :slight_smile:

I've created a couple of videos, but so far YouTube has only been able to process one of them, so here it is:

Again, this is only our prototype board we had made. The final board will have:

  • female header receptacles on the top side
  • male header pins on the bottom to connect directly to the Arduino
  • full silkscreen, ground plane, and a nicer color than the drab light green we currently have :slight_smile:

As a recap, you'll get 802.11b wireless access, with full support for encryption (WEP, WPA/2, TKIP/AES). The shield will be able to connect to an access point (infrastructure mode) or create it's own network (adhoc mode). You'll be able to put the TCP/IP stack on the Arduino, so it can serve out it's own webpages (like in the videos I've posted). More likely though, I would imagine the biggest use of this would be as some sort of environment sensing device, so it wouldn't necessarily need to serve a webpage, but rather just send back some data from a sensor.

The timeframe is looking like end of April to early May. I hope to have my website and storefront up by then, along with lots of documentation to help users get up and running quickly.

** Edit **
Here's another video showing the Arduino and WiFi shield operating in adhoc mode, using the Arduino to wirelessly control a TV and DVD player. Note that the delay in seeing anything happen is because my TV and DVD player are ancient and take a while to turn on. The delay between the time you hit the button on the iPod and the time it sends the IR code is very small.

Very impressive - tally another sure buy for me.

Sounds very interesting!
I would be interested in buying one of these :slight_smile:
But do you have any expected date when the first revision will be available?

I hope to have shields available late April to early May. I wish I could be a little more specific, but I'm at the whim of my supplier who is still getting everything organized.

Great to hear this. I saw your videos on youtube. I am very excited about the web server and the adhoc networking. Question: will their be access to the web server? If it's open hardware, does that make the software in the device open software.