Arduino, UDOO Wireless Communication

[otpowell]

Ok, I want to control some things wirelessly.  I have a billion different things in my amazon and banggood shopping card.  I'm looking to minimize a bit and find out the best components to buy that's the least hassle free and efficient too.  I'm thinking about using an arduino UNO, hooked to a CC3000 board that communicates wirelessly with a teensy or arduino micro/ESP8266/relay combo.  Should I go with this component CONFIG or should I use bluetooth or different wireless modules?  I was looking at bluefruit, zigbee, xbee, NRF24L01, bluegigA ble113..  Any of these better than my CC3000, ESP8266 combo?  Any suggestions would be appreciated!  Thanks in advance.. 

[jasonwu]

There are many arduino wireless solutions. It depend on your application. If the application is indoor and tons of data, the wifi is good choice. ESP8266 or CC3000 is a good choice. If the application are remote and cloud based, the GPRS/3G module is good choice. But you need to pay for the data.
If the application are outdoor and small data, there are RF based on sub-G band(433MHz, 868MHz or 915MHz) are available. Uart port integrate and turnkey solution, such as XBEE, RFM12 or RF4432 module.
http://www.appconwireless.com/PRODUCTS/showproduct.php?lang=en&id=7

[otpowell]

You can't really make a sensible decision without considering requirements like physical transmit / receive range, burst throughput requirements (tx and rx), average throughput requirements (tx and rx), what your battery life minimum and ideal would be, what maximum and average power consmption you need to stay under, what kinds of batteries you can use, physical size of unit and antenna, whether you must transmit through obstacles like walls / structures / foliage / terrain, tolerable cost per module, whether the modules must communicate central point to many nodes in a star, or mesh / point to point.

You also must consider whether you have other noise sources like other wireless devices in the area which will likely make the reliability less due to increased power consumption or decreased error free performance, etc.

Beyond that you said 'hassle free' but you include things as basic as nRF24 to things as complex as bluetooth LE and 802.11.  What is a hassle?  Writing code?  In C?  XML configurations?  Using an AT command set or similar?  Writing some kind of DIY protocol to encode and decode a bitstream and parse / generate the data framing, encode / decode messages, implement error detection / correction / retransmission logic?  Changing batteries every month?  Adding in solar cells and rechargeable batteries?  Too many variables.

I guess a basic solution would be something like an XBEE module or ESP8266 since they are easy to use in the "protocol" aspects and they hide a lot of the circuit and software complexity from you.  But what frequency / protocol / technology is best is only depending on your needs.

The XBEE is probably more hassle free than ESP8266 since I hear the latter can have some "flaky" unreliable aspects that require some kind of reset / recovery / error handling sometimes.

Bluetooth smart is somewhat complex even with many module solutions like the nice BLE113, and the throughput is very low.

I don't know why you would use a CC3000 / CC3100 / CC3200 *and* ESP8266 though unless you find you need a more sophisticated access point than the latter offers in a central role, but it seems simpler to use it for both AP and client roles in the case of using it at all since it is in many ways better than the ESP8266, though somewhat more expensive.  If you just wanted a powerful AP central role though then it would seem that an ordinary PC and/or wireless router would be easiest if you have one that would be suitable for the task.

Thanks for such an extensive and in depth reply!  I appreciate the information greatly.  By hassle free, I guess I mean compatibility/component problems.  I hate it when I buy something only to find out I have to buy something else to get it to work better or correctly.  I just wanna buy the two devices and be able to do a lot.  I know some of these devices have limitations and others do more than others, like the cc3000 board for example you can interface directly with that board.  Ok maybe I don't know what I'm talking about but I'm learning. 


O.T.
Electrical & Electronics Engineering
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