Henry Leinen / WifiPlusClick

Implementation of the WifiPlusClick hardware module.

Dependents:   WifiPlusKlickExample

WifiPlusClick Libary

Overview

This library implements the functionality exposed by a WifiPlusClick module from MikroElektronika (http://www.mikroe.com/click/wifi-plus/).

The WifiPlusClick module is an easy to handle module which provides access to up to 8 simultaneous socket objects - which is an an important aspect when you want to implement your own web server.

When I first started with the more commonly used Wifly module, I found out that the Wifly module does not reliably serve webpages which include other resources like images, JavaScript files or CSS files. The root cause seems to be the limitation that Wifly is only able to handle a single socket at this time. So I searched for an alternative and found this (actually cheaper) alternative :

WifiPlusClick HW Module

This module comes with its own limitations. The WifiPlusClick Module interface does not allow to use broadcasting or multicasting on UDP sockets. There are some additional limitations, but I think these are not so important. The following functionality is provided by the module and my library implementation :

1. Wifi functionality
   1. Connections using AD-HOC or INFRASTRUCTURE mode
   2. List all available Wifi beacons
   3. WEP and WPA/WPA2 security modes including binary and ASCII keys
   4. reading binary WPA key after successfull Connection to speed up connection time
2. Socket functionality
   1. UDP sockets
   2. TCP sockets

Limitations

I found the following limitations:

1. UDP sockets cannot use multicasting or broadcasting
2. set_option functionality is not provided by the HW
3. 8 sockets can be configured with 1024 bytes of buffer each or 1 socket with 8192 bytes of buffer.

Sample application

Here is my sample application which you can use as a starting point.

NOTE

The implementation of the Sockets in this library is still not completely tested. I only tested the TCP part of the sockets. Please let me know what your experiences are when using the library. I will be working on a multithreaded version of this library...