I’m building a network of wireless (using NRF24L01 + PA + SMA Antenna) lighting relays to turn on/off outdoor holiday lights which are sync’d to music.
My idea is to build network of transmitters (TX) that control 8 receivers each.
Each receiver will contain very simple circuitry to activate a small relay to turn on/off a single strand of lights.
I need to update each receivers about 10 times second (100 ms).
I’m looking for suggestions on the following:
How to poll / update the receivers in the most efficient and fastest way.
The message to each receiver only needs to be 1 or 0.
Is it possible to send a broadcast message to all 8 receivers?
My idea is basically sending the same message to each receiver. The message would contain the on/off status for all 8 receivers. Each receiver would have an ID or address (1-8) and decode the appropriate on/off status.
I believe sending a broadcast message would be much faster than polling each receiver. Any experience or recommendations?
Also is there a way to receive the ACK from each receiver without waiting? I don’t really need an ACK back from the receiver, I will be able to visually see if it working but it might be nice to receive an ACK every so often (every 1 second or 20 messages).
Any progress on this project? It's similar to a project I'm trying to do but mine a little more simple; I only have 2 receivers.
So far, if only one receiver is powered on, everything works great. However, if 2 receivers are on and actively collecting transmitter data, they seem to be getting a lot of interference. Almost like the data is getting mangled and neither receiver is getting "clean" data. Once in a while they update and get the correct data but most of the time not.
Does anyone have any ideas or links to what needs to be done for multiple RF24 receivers to work correctly from one common RF24 transmitter?
for updates you could use broadcasts, for polling a round robin schema
broadcasts (32 byte per packet) are absolutely feasible
you would have to synchronize the acks, I would prefer polling (getting back 32 byte payload)
To send broadcasts auto acknowledge has to be disabled.
So one common pipe address (autoacknowledge-disabled)
could be used for all nodes, one sending, all other listening.
It is also possible to disable the autoacknowledge for a single send, or even global.
Each receiver could get a personal pipe for autoacknowledge traffic with payload.
I would really suggest to read the datasheet of the NRF24L01+.
