A while ago Farnell sent email to me and offered one (inexpensive) product as a sample in exchange for mentioning it at this blog. I browsed for a while for an interesting part and settled with Microchip MRF24WB0MA/RM WiFi module (Order code 1823142). This module is quite inexpensive and is used in products like WiShield and thus has good Arduino support.
I wanted to upgrade my electricity meter to communicate with WLAN to get rid of XBee receiver at the back of my server. After some prototyping I ended up using RN-XV module from Roving Networks. Since my application did not have to do any fancy network stuff, RN-XV was a perfect match. It has the same footprint as XBee module, which I was already using, so the hardware required no changes. The module supports WPA2 security and can remember it’s settings. Communication via HTTP request is incredibly easy, I set up the module to generate http request to my home servers address each time when AtMega output measurement data.
In the end, only changes I made was to modify server backend to accept HTTP requests and change the code running on the AtMega to output measurement data periodically instead listening request from XBee.
The RN-XV was configured with following commands:
$$$
set ip dhcp 1 # get ip from dhcp
set wlan auth 4 # use wpa2-psk encryption
set wlan phrase password # set network password
set wlan ssid network # set the name of accesspoint to connect
set wlan linkmon 5 # After 5 tries declare connection to AP lost and try to reconnect again.
set ip proto 18 // turn on HTTP mode=0x10 + TCP mode = 0x2
set ip flags 0x6 # close tcp connection if accesspoint is lost
set ip host ip # server ip address
set ip remote 8080 # server port
set com remote GET$/? # GET string to be sent to server. Any data from uart will be concatenated to this string
set uart mode 2
All in all, for simple projects, I can really recommend the RN-XV module over the MRF24 due it’s simplicity, but definitely not for reliability. Both modules cost about the same, but apart from Sparkfun I don’t know who else has them in stock. Farnell could start selling them, since ordering from Sparkfun can get expensive if you don’t live in the states.
Sources can be found from the repository: https://github.com/JanneMantyharju/electricity-monitor
Monitoring electricity usage at home
Measurer
The schematic for the device is quite simple:
For more detail: Updating electricity meter to communicate via WLAN
