Epyon
Well-known member
Hi all
Over the past few years, I've done a number of different projects involving networked microcontrollers, most of them a Teensy combined with various Wiznet W5xxx chips. Important in these projects is the possibility of having DHCP, DNS and the ability of sending and parsing HTTP strings. With the Ethernet library, the Teensy+W5xxx combo has no problems accomplishing this.
For a new project I need to add WiFi as a connectivity option. I've searched this and other forums and blogs for the most optimal WiFi solution, particularly I'm looking for a solution that has an easy to use (wrapper) library. My requirements are:
I've narrowed it down to the following options:
From a hardware point of view, the ESP8266 looks like the best solution. It has a low price, my application doesn't need high throughput and I can afford dedicating one of the Teensy UARTS to the module. Unfortunately library support still seems to be lacking at the moment.
From the software side, the Photon is the best option (on paper), but perfomance and price is less than optimal. Plus I would like to keep all my firmware on a single platform (Teensy).
Any advice or pointers on this?
Over the past few years, I've done a number of different projects involving networked microcontrollers, most of them a Teensy combined with various Wiznet W5xxx chips. Important in these projects is the possibility of having DHCP, DNS and the ability of sending and parsing HTTP strings. With the Ethernet library, the Teensy+W5xxx combo has no problems accomplishing this.
For a new project I need to add WiFi as a connectivity option. I've searched this and other forums and blogs for the most optimal WiFi solution, particularly I'm looking for a solution that has an easy to use (wrapper) library. My requirements are:
- Usable through Arduino IDE
- Minimal changes needed to existing code (e.g. Arduino WiFi library)
- DHCP and DNS support
- Target platform must have support for the Ethernet library (I won't use both connectivity options at the same time however)
- No AT commands please (I still have nightmares about writing a firmware that had to interface to a GPRS modem that only accepted a proprietary AT command set)
I've narrowed it down to the following options:
- ESP8266: low price, decent performance. Bought a few modules to tinker with. Annoyingly a lot of modules with different firmware versions floating around. Haven't found a decent library with the features and ease of use of the Ethernet library yet.
- Particle Photon: decent price, interesting features like cloud updates and monitoring. Bought a few modules. Stability seems to be an issue. My firmware heavily relies on serial, SPI and I2C I/O and the Photon seems to have trouble delivering deterministic performance on this. A lot of Arduino libraries are incompatible, and the price point is too high to just use it as a Wifi gateway.
- CC3300: higher price point. Bought a few modules but have yet to play around with them. A lot of users are complaining about shaky performance though.
From a hardware point of view, the ESP8266 looks like the best solution. It has a low price, my application doesn't need high throughput and I can afford dedicating one of the Teensy UARTS to the module. Unfortunately library support still seems to be lacking at the moment.
From the software side, the Photon is the best option (on paper), but perfomance and price is less than optimal. Plus I would like to keep all my firmware on a single platform (Teensy).
Any advice or pointers on this?