Which is the easier way to have a WiFi connection: arduino WiFi shield or the XBee Shield + RN-XV WiFly ??
Are both library well developed?
Bye
Depends on your other needs. The WiFi shield is connected to the Arduino over SPI while the RN-XV uses the USART. If you need the USART for other tasks (like debugging) you better go for the WiFi shield.
The often proposed solution with a SoftwareSerial for the RN-XV isn't really an option because the RN-XV is quite picky about serial timings. I didn't got it to run on SoftwareSerial with even with only 9600 baud. Also the WiFi shield has more flexibility because the source code of it's firmware is now published and can be changed relatively easily.
If you just need a stable, tested hardware and you can live with just one possible connection, go with the RN-XV given you don't need the USART for other things.
And what about the libraries, are both well developed or one of them are easier to use?
For the RN-XV there are multiple libraries around, none of them fulfilled my expectations when I evaluated about half a year ago. This may have changed in the meantime. One of the biggest drawback they had was a missing timeout feature for the serial communication. If any response was not an expected one the library just hanged in an endless loop. Without a watchdog the device was freezing.
The WiFi library from Arduino is relatively young so it may still have some teething problems. I think if there are any the relevant problems reside in the firmware, though.
On this way I guess the original Arduino WiFi shiled is better considering that it can still improve.
I'll make a serach on the web looking for the possible bugs on the current firmware. Do you maybe already know some of them?
Thanks
I know a limitation but no confirmed bug (yet). The WiFi shield communication is limited to TCP traffic at the moment (UDP basics is in the firmware but the SPI communication protocol between the shield and the Arduino does not support UDP yet).