Hey everyone! I was hoping to get your advice on what Arduino boards to look at for a project I'm working on. The project involves two separate boxes in different rooms of my apartment (~ 5-10 feet away from each other) and needs to allow wireless communication of very small amounts of information (think like 5 bytes).
While I have worked a good bit with the Arduino Uno, I haven't worked with boards with Wifi capabilities.
The boards I know of are: Esp32, Esp8266, Arduino MKR 1010, Arduino Mega RobotDyn.
What would be the best board for a project like this / are there other boards that are well-suited for a project like this?
Probably the easiest would be a ESP 8266, or ESP 3, it is definitely way more then what you need but they are very inexpensive. This response is to help you get started in solving your problem, not solve it for you.
Good Luck & Have Fun!
Gil
Arduino Nano 33 IoT has both WiFi and Bluetooth. It is a good option for you. You can try both WiFi and Bluetooth. You can also refer to the list of WiFi options for Arduino.
"What would be the best board for a project like this / are there other boards that are well-suited for a project like this?"
I've got a couple of the WeMOS D1 development boards with the ESP8266 chips. They work pretty much like an UNO style board. They have pin headers that make attaching hookup wires easy, and a micro USB port for power and serial connection to a computer. I got the USB cable (cell phone style) and USB wall charger for external power at the DollarTree store for $1 each.
Anything + 433MHz el-cheapo RF modules (the RXB-12 or others based on SYN470/SYN480 is a much better receivers, much longer range, more reliable through walls, etc, compared to the cheap green ones that are most common. The cheap transmitters are fine though) is good. Would generally recommend a simple '328p-based board like nano/promini/uno as the default in this case - tons of code/examples/etc online, clones cost about the price of a good cup of coffee. I wouldn't use an ESP* if going with these kind of transmitters though.
NRF24 is okay, but they're more expensive, and my general impression is that they can be hard to get reliable operation from.
An entirely viable approach is WiFi; running the code on an ESP8266 (as opposed to some other Arduino with ESP8266 running default (AT) firmware) would be fine and simple/cheap - the receiver would act as server, and the other could just make a request against it. An ESP32 is a similar option if you need higher performance, as is the aforementioned ESP8266
I wouldn't try to make bluetooth work reliably through walls.
Like, if I were doing it, I'd go with the first option, but I also made my own library for those, and hence have a particular affection for them, which probably exceeds what the technology justifies.