I have been hearing some rumblings about the TI CC1200 that was release recently. Seems to have some pretty awesome features. As I look towards stuff like encryption/security, mesh networking, and wake-on radio, I am wondering if something like the CC120 would be a nice new addition to the moteino family?
http://www.ti.com/product/cc1200
http://www.asmag.com/showpost/15337.aspx
It looks to be the new darling child of the "Flutter Wireless" project on kickstarter at the moment. Although, they are saying they wont have anything ready for 8+ months. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2021474419/flutter-20-wireless-arduino-with-half-mile-1km-ran
What do you guys think? Could we pull together a moteino to steal their thunder? How does the TI chip compare with some of the stats on the existing moteino radios?
I think it's awesome that more of these chips are being manufactured. More options is better. However that means more drivers and designs have to be created.
Making an RF product that actually works well and is designed properly is a hard problem. TI provides two reference designs so that's nice.
The 1k price is $2.2, not bad. The sample price is $6-7 at digi, so you'd have to buy 1k to even make it worth it. And that would require a kickstarter or a lot of faith. Then you need to have a driver (not sure if TI provides any).
The assembly is another big problem, you have to either have a NICE PNP that can place those 0402s, or outsource it, which means your margin will go down south. So from concept/idea to product it's a LOOONG road, even with the simple Moteinos and other hardware I design, let alone with these highly integrated transceivers.
So I will keep an eye on the Flutter kickstarter, curious if they make it (i mean deliver it).
Most features are comparable and/or a little better than the SX1231. I like the separate 128 RX/TX fifos, I'd love that. But 1 shared 64byte FIFO is more than sufficient for 99% of what I and my users need. We're not streaming 1080p movies here...
As I noted here (http://lowpowerlab.com/forum/index.php/topic,125.0.html), it makes little sense for me to start spreading my wings too much. I don't have the capacity/time resource to design another such product, because I know it takes very many hours before fruition, and it's a hard problem. Plus Moteino is so small that I'd have to either design a small daughter board like the HopeRF products, or make Moteino longer which I don't want. Plus I don't have a PNP and outsourcing assembly is expensive.
Flutter claims 1/2 mile of range. Nice. Check this thread (http://lowpowerlab.com/forum/index.php/topic,112.0.html) where John reported 1 .5mile range with Moteino R3 at 1.2kbps :)
Also see this thread (http://lowpowerlab.com/forum/index.php/topic,114.0.html). I think I like how Moteino R3 is performing, and a lot of people tell me so too. For now I will build upon this platform, I have a lot of ideas and I don't want to lose focus.
But thanks a lot for mentioning it! I've seen at least a handful of similar projects on kickstarter, all kinds of features, all cool and such. All nice and everything. But pricewise and feature wise it's hard to beat Moteino, not that it's my product.
Thanks for the reply Felix. The one thing you failed to mention is that the moteino is available today, which is a plus :) I'm pretty keen on using moteino and cant wait to get a couple coming. Long term I can see myself needing the mesh stuff, which if the flutter guys do end up open sourcing would be something that might appeal to me. But in a best case they will be next year and I want to get building right away.
Would love to hear some of your perspective sometime in a blogpost about the challenges and hurdles of implementing mesh with the moteino. Thanks for all your hard work, I'm looking forward to helping you pull on the oars for a bit.
You got it, Moteino is available now. I've had hurdles with stocking and PCB manufacturing which is a real pain and bottleneck. But other than that I've been able to supply the demand from my little lab with my improvised methods which are surprisingly effective.
I already have a mesh prototype working with Moteino R3, right now waiting to implement/deploy it on a large farm telemetry project.
I might only offer it as a commercial option for Moteino R3 once it is tested. However these types of projects take a long time to go through a complete cycle.
I will probably blog about it to let the world know about it's existence when it's in very stable state, but meshing is a complicated business with many performance/reliability tradeoffs, I'm afraid open sourcing it will cause a lot of headache and support for me, which I am not ready for. I've invested a huge amount of time in developing/testing the mesh lib. The range that is already achievable with the regular lib is great, hundreds of meters as is, and ever more by tweaking the settings. So for 99% of people the free lib works fine.