:o
I have a project where the ESP32 would be perfectly suitable however... there are some issues which makes me fall back to the good old Arduino.
I would need in a project which can measure voltage and current (ACS 712) from a load then make that data available over telnet. As my research shows the available current sensors for ESPs on the market can do around 3.6A max, I need more and then I would like to control relays, which again available from 3.3V versions but for double of the cost of the regular 5V relays and ultimately I already built circuit with 5V arduino to do all these but with the ESP32 I would have to throw out all my work and start it from stratch so one word than a hundred, I give up with using the ESP32.
I need the data to be provided through telnet to multiple computers on the network. For this I could just connect the arduino to a raspberry pi through USB but low power consumption is a key point of this project and I don't want to use a full computer.
I was considering to use the: Ethernet Shield W5100
The latest Arduino Ethernet Shield on the market. As my research shows the power consumption of this board is quite a lot, 150mA so coupled with a Leonardo = 200mA constant current draw.
I wouldn't mind using wifi board but there isn't? any official yet. All I could find are ESP shields such as:
WiFi current: continuous transmission: ?70mA (200mA MAX) + 50mA leonardo so we are still a bit better than using the Ethernet shield.
Could you recommend any other TCP/IP based (wired or wireless) lower power communication solution?
For those who have experience with the ethernet shield and wifi shields I would particularly like to know if multiple simoulteanous TCP connections are possible or NOT possible for them:
I would not have that many clients just 5-10 but they can connect any time to the Arduino to poll the data through telnet and they cannot be blocked by each other.
If I would be using a standard Raspberry PI with C code this would not be an issue, that would even handle hundreds of clients with socket server.
My other big concern here is exhaustion, I want this project to work roboustly through a long time, not that it runs out of handles, sockets or it just crashes at a point.
All suggestions are welcome!