Low power, wireless communication with sensors

20 Oct 2010

Hi,

I would like to hang a sensor outsite my house, for example a temperature sensor, and I want it to sent its readings every 5 minutes to a mbed powered read station.

What is the best way to setup the wireless connection? I would like to power the sensors using a battery, but I do not want to change the battery every day, so it should be as low power as possible.

One solution I found is using XBee. Is that a good sollution or are there better ones?

20 Oct 2010

Well, you could use the Xbee, with digital inputs and outputs to set the sensor to read through uart.
It all depends on what kind of output the sensor haves. You could use a simple analogue temperature sensor, and send it through the xbee Analog input.

Lerche

20 Oct 2010

TI has some low-power RF solutions, might be worth a try.

20 Oct 2010

The TI/Chipcon CC1101 ultra low power 868 MHz chipset is available in an easy-to-use form from Seeed Studios as the RFbee - it's an Arduino-compatible AVR attached to the CC1101 via SPI - you could either patch into the SPI or use the AVR as is for the sensor. It saves a lot of time designing an antenna and matching circuit, and is also cheaper than other eval boards which only have the radio and not the AVR.

07 Nov 2010

Hello

I use small devices from http://www.hoperf.com/rf_fsk/rfm12.htm  called rfm12. They have a SPI Interface and are easy to use. In germany they will cost abot 5 € .

 

The RFM12B devices are 3.3 Volt devices

07 Nov 2010

user Dieter Brueggemann wrote:

Hello

I use small devices from http://www.hoperf.com/rf_fsk/rfm12.htm  called rfm12. They have a SPI Interface and are easy to use. In germany they will cost abot 5 € .

 

The RFM12B devices are 3.3 Volt devices

07 Nov 2010

user Franz Achatz wrote:

 

user Dieter Brueggemann wrote:

Hello

I use small devices from http://www.hoperf.com/rf_fsk/rfm12.htm  called rfm12. They have a SPI Interface and are easy to use. In germany they will cost abot 5 € .

 

The RFM12B devices are 3.3 Volt devices

 

sorry, try it once more. My Ipad generates empty postings, here :-)

Please have a look at the Jeelabs page or look for Jennic wire less products.

 

best regards

Franz