Newbie question - advice on which Arduino board?

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

Hi, I'm an electrical engineering student, and have had Arduino recommended to me by my thesis supervisor. For my thesis, I'm planning on designing a system with 100 current sensors around a house sending data back to a base station (possibly a laptop).

Each of these sensors would need an MCU to interface between the sensor and the wireless communication device. I don't yet know what either of these will be, but that may be influenced by what board I choose. I'm currently thinking either XBee or ANT for wireless and maybe something like this for the sensor [amploc.com/store/index.html].

So my question: What board would you recommend? Something small, efficient, low power, with good sleep mode and just a couple of ADC ports is all I need. I'm just overwhelmed by the amount of options out there, and don't know where to start looking!

Your help is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

2

The XBee has an MCU with an ADC built into it. If all you want to do is read in an ADC port and transmit it to a central "base" station that can all be done directly on the XBee unit - no external MCU required.

(That should also save a lot of $$$ since you need 100 of them.)

3

Thanks Robbo. Xbee is looking pretty attractive to me right now.

4

cool project would be nice to see the results

5

You should also check the jeenode :

http://news.jeelabs.org/2009/03/05/jeenode-v2-pcb/

6

The new YellowJacket from Asynclabs has an ATMega328 with a WiFi module packed onto a board the size of a box of matches.

http://www.asynclabs.com/

If you want to go wireless, it's hard to beat WiFi and they are cheap too.

http://www.asynclabs.com/store?page=shop.product_details&flypage=flypage.tpl&product_id=24&category_id=11