Wireless communication

Projects General Guidance
1

I am fairly new to the Arudino. I have made projects to control servos and leds, but nothing with any use to this point. That is all about to change. I am starting a home automation project. I am wanting to start small and simple and move from there. I am looking at some guidance as far as where to start.

So my plan is:

  1. have a temperature/humidity sensor in five rooms.
  2. have those senors wireless communicate with the Arudino with the value.
  3. have the arduino communicate with a server to log the data
  4. have the server present the data to a user with a nice visual effect via internet.

I am currently stuck on step #2. I have read many instructions and seen other's projects, but cannot decided that is the best method of having the sensors all report to a single aruidno. Would I have multiple arduinos in the house connected to sensors...and those arduinos connected to one arduino that communicates to the server? WIFI or RF? can somone give me a good starting point please? Like i said this is my real first project, so im a little overwhelmed with all the options I have. I am just needing a simple, cheap, yet piratical way to log sensor values so long term I am able to expand on it. Thank you.

2

I have used the NRF24L01 wireless modules for a similar project. They are pretty cheap and not to hard to use. A module in receive mode can listen to up to 6 transmitters.

3

You will need an Arduino (probably a small cheap one) and an NRF24 module at every sensor location - unless 2 or more sensor are close enough to be wired to the same Arduino.

As far as I know if all the slaves work on the same frequency and only transmit when the master tells them to you could easily connect dozens of them to a single master. The NRF24 can act as master or slave.

...R