Recently had Arduino Mega 2560 R3 for xmas - no former knowledge of micro controllers.
Decided I needed wifi connection for a project, read on various forums, purchased 2 Arduino reference books, and it seemed to me I needed a wireless shield - no former knowledge of shields - still reading books!
Purchased wireless SD shield from Maplin, and have fitted to Mega, run scan sketch and WPA2 sketch. Scan sketch says no wireless networks and has a MAC address of 00:00:00:00 and WPA2 sketch simply says no wireless network.
Note. Absouletely NO instructions or guidance with shield. So not hints there.
Having read numerous forum posts, and watched some youtube, I'm guessing now I need to stack something like an Xbee wifi module on top of the wireless SD shield.
Simple advice humbly sought from more knowledgeable forum members:
a) Do I need Wireless Shield AND Xbee module, or could XBee module run directly on mega board?
b) If Xbee required, what is function does Wireless SD shield perform from the WIFI perspective (apart from of course providing SD capability)
c) Having no experience of XBee, and having already mis-purchased what I thought was a wifi card ready to work out of box, could someone please offer advice as to which xbee module is required for my Mega to connect to a web based service on the internet?
( Project will ultimately be to upload data from a sensor to an online cloud database, and I know there are lots of info and code for this type of project, but first I need to get the basic hardware sorted else i'm going nowhere).
I've searched every keyword I can think of but not come across anything on the forum or google that answers the basic question of how to get it to work - apologies if ive missed it.
All advice gratefully received before I become to frustrated and throw my xmas present away.
Thanks in advance.