Hello all and thanks to anyone that can help me out with a project I'm doing.
I would like to have multiple wireless switches spaced out around a central receiving location. I would like the range to be at least 500 feet from the central tower to the wireless switch.
When a switch in the field is closed I would like the central tower to tell me which switch was closed (every switch has a number assigned to it). I was thinking of having an arduino in the central tower but was hoping I wouldn't need one in each wireless switch to keep cost down.
My main goal is to keep each wireless switch under $50. Whats the best way to do this? Rx/tx pairs, xbee's, etc.
My main goal is to keep each wireless switch under $50.
An Arduino Pro Mini 328 - 5V/16MHz - http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9218 - is $19 so far under $50 so adding an Arduino in every switch may be still an option. You could do complete handshakes so the switch knows that its signal has been received, collision detection can be build etc. One can even imagine that every switch knows about all the state of other switches, which opens new possibilities.
You can buy a 2 mile XBee Pro-ZB for rather a bit under $50 and that can easily report the status of multiple switches on each node to a central XBee Coordinator. This can then be connected to an arduino to do the bulk of the processing from this.
$50 seems a very easy budget to fit into
Now if you'd said $20 it would be more tricky but I could probably still pull up some ideas (there's always disadvantages to the cheap option though).
The new XBee-ZB modules are also lower power than the old modules so they would be better anyway if you do go down the XBee route.
