Help WITH ARDUINO

Forum 2005-2010 (read only) General Frequently-Asked Questions
1

Hello Everyone,
I have just recently started reading up on microcontrollers to implement this project we have. When I asked about this in a different forum, somebody mentioned arduino, and it's only been a few hours since I've been reading up on it, so I was hoping to receive some input from you guys.

First, the project:
Touchscreen LCD that receives data via wifi from specified website upon logging in. It displays that data and transmits data back to the website. It's fairly simple, but we just have to build this so that it could receive and deliver messages very fast over wireless internet. We'd like for it to be as close as possible to the rate at which one would receive the message through a browser in a PC if someone else posted a message on their account.

Any suggestions on which arduino would best fit this project? Also, is it possible for arduino to perform this task at such a rate I mentioned above? Thanks everyone. I'm thinking that I might end up using Arduino instead of PIC depending on what you guys have to say about it.

Thanks

2

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the Arduino isn't really a good match for this sort of application. The big shortcoming is that it doesn't have enough memory to hold a "modern" webpage during the "rendering" that is required to format the page for a screen, even if the screen is relatively smart. (unless it's actually a very small web page.) Arduino is also not well equipped for "very fast" networking (though the need for fast networking may be somewhat overstated unless you're doing multimedia type things (overstated in general, not just for your project.)

Something like a beagleboard (http://www.beagleboard.org) or even an old or small PC clone would work better (though it might cease to be an interesting project at that point.)