First - sorry for "advertising", but this is not a commercial thing..
I would like to introduce you my non-commercial project:
The Cumulus Project is an open-source wireless mesh network platform for home monitoring, remote control and automation systems.
It consists of an RaspberryPi with an nRF24L01+ 2.4GHz 2MBIT Radio as the "Master" or "Controller AP" and nodes - which are a board with an ATMega328P + nRF24L01 Radio + GPIO Headers on it (which is Arduino compatible and programmed in the Arduino IDE).
I really need your feedback and I am very thankful for any support. I have the prototypes up and running PERFECTLY and I am working on realtime-hubs for the RaspberryPi and new Board Layouts (even smaller than 3x3cm now). I make use of Socket.IO and ZeroMQ, which are modern technologies used in near-realtime communication.
So what you can do with it? You can monitor temperature, moisture, I/O pins of hundreds and thousands of nodes in your home or whereever you want. But you can also use it as your personal Wireless Development Platform.
So help me guys to make this project a reality!
Check it out here
For the technically interested people:
I am using the following things in this project: RF24 Library from ManiacBug, RF24Network Library from ManiacBug, RF24 Library for the RaspberryPi, Node.js, Socket.IO, ZeroMQ and an Arduino-Compatible ATMega328P supplied from 3.0/3.3V Battery.
It would give more flexibility if it is a mobile app, connecting to raspberry Pi via IP network.
Since most of the smartphone USB connections support USB OTG , You can consider making a board with RF module and micro USB male connector, which can be connected with smart phone. Then you can take complete control of 6LowPAN devices in smart phone.
Thank you for your post. Yes, I did also consider using the RFM12 Family or AVRs with integrated RF.
Unfortunately the RFM12 did not provide 6 receiving pipes, was slow and compared to the nRF24L01+ a bit
unrelieble. For the AVRs with RF - they are nice but too expensive. I try to make us get the sensor nodes
with nRF24L01+ for ca. €5-10 total.
Also I got good news from the power usage side - I have optimized my code to go into deep-sleep mode
(both AVR and nRF24L01+) and it consumes a lot less power.
A smartphone app is already planned. USB-OTG-Receivers would be a nice idea, but I think it would be too
complicated.
