I am building an Arduino based house alarm. I am monitoring the entrances with magnetic switches. I am trying to make it wireless, running off batteries. I need a low power transmitter to tell the arduino an entrance has bee breached. The xbee transceiver is more than I need and uses too much power. Please help?
Thanks
Rico Bravo
One possibility is to use X10.
You could use a X10 wireless transmitter (~$10 ea.)
Arduino Playground - CM17A to send the switch signal to the powerline.
[edit]I've used this as a battery operated remote sensor for temperature. Sending once / 8min (between sleeps) I'm getting about 1 month using 2xAA NiMH (eneloop) batteries. For a switch you may do better since you can wake up from sleep only when the switch is activated.[/edit]
You can pick it up off the powerline and into the Arduino with this:
http://www.arduino.cc/playground/X10/ReceiveX10
I have a blog on the subject here:
How about something like this:
I bought these 315MHz RF modules from Sparkfun and used the VirtualWire library. ($10 for both).
I avoided ther 434MHz modules since I have some wireless temperature modules that use that frequency.
You can find my example code in this forum message (reply #14)
It could get tricky if you want to use multiple transmitters (to avoid sending on top of each other).