Hi All,
I am advancing with my project (a drone project that I use as a learning project) and now I am thinking about the control using a smartphone.
My moteino has the Transceiver chip on it and I was wondering if I can program that to act as a host and wireless communicate with my smartphone.
I saw that on arduino people used ESP8266 chip, but isn't that redundant if I already have a tranciever on my moteino board?
Thanks,
Catlain
The transceiver is sub-ghz. Wifi is 2.4ghz, so no you cannot do that unless you make some kind of bridge using a wifi module (ESP8266?) + another transceiver.
Felix, thank you for your reply!
I will get an extra module... From consumption and signal transfers point of view, is it better to get a Bluetooth or a Wifi (i.e. the ESP8266)?
In case of ESP8266 , will I be able to power supply it from the moteino 3.3V out and direclty use the TX and RX from the board? I found some comments that in case of Ardunio UNO the RX and TX pins have a different voltage and I should use a logic level converter.
I do not recommend using the Moteino as a power supply for anything else other than sensors. The ESP8266 especially is power hungry when it transmits.
Bluetooth is different than wifi, it really depends on what you want to do. Since you mention a smartphone I would explore bluetooth maybe?
Moteino is 3.3v so anything 5v may need logic conversion.
If you want direct communications with a SmartPhone, Bluetooth, specifically Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is the way I would recommend. There are some relatively low cost and useful modules called RFDuino which have Arduino support and quite a bit of capability (ARM processor, etc.). The first version of this module was REALLY constrained from an IO perspective, but you could set up a serial link (UART, SPI, or I2C) between the RFDuino and Moteino processor. UART is probably the easiest to implement (due to Full Duplex ASYNC nature of the interface). The RFDuino modules are also very low power consumption.
Tom