I am after some advice, I am doing a project based on Internet of things in health and safety monitoring, I am going to be using xbee's to communicate through wireless network and monitor the sensors.
I am going to make a central hub for the sensors to communicate back to, however I dont know which arduino to use. It has to be expandable for future developments so will need extra pins. I also will be using an Ethernet shield to connect to the cloud and upload data and maybe a GSM module.
Can anyone recommend a good arduino which will be able to handle the project, also some gudience on xbee will be a great start as I have never worked with it before!
For just reading some sensor data and pushing them to a central device, a simple chinese Nano clone will suffice.
However, you are limited with RAM and FLASH. With my project, I am already crossing that line which is why I recently have added external serial RAM modules.
In case the central device does not need to do any further calculation/data aggregation, you may use e.g. a mega board. A Due will be a lot faster and hast more power, but is a little more expensive.
Hiran001:
It has to be expandable for future developments so will need extra pins.
If you have to ask the question, get a Mega. You are likely to run out of memory before you run out of pins.
Projects like yours are all much the same.
collection
display
recording
Ethernet
Internet
Arduino is pretty good at sharing pins but the libraries used to do essential functions can quickly take up the memory - and don't share any of it. Requiring 40k or so is common for this sort of job, but a Uno is struggling to give you 32. A mega with 256k may seem like overkill and, as far as memory is concerned, it probably is, but its only a few dollars more and can save a lot of grief.
The problem is it is funded by the company and they can only order from registered sites.. and eBay isn't one of them.. this is my problem, I am thinking of just using an Arduino UNO and a GSM module with the xbee and thats it.. what do you guys think? Only reason for this decision is the firewall wouldnt let me into to using the ethernet shield.
