I’m experimenting with building a wireless sensor network for monitoring various aspects of my house as well as some automation projects. I have 4 main use cases that I’m targeting: landscape monitoring, crawl spaces to monitor humidity, soil moisture and temp, authentication for garage door.
Originally I was going to create nodes with an MSP430s and a nRF24AP2 for the RF uplink. My initial concern was battery life since some of the nodes will be placed in a hard to access muddy crawl space or out in the garden. After reading some of your forum posts I’m getting slightly concerned about range even with the duck antenna. I knew that TI offered some small SoCs that worked in the 915MHz range and decided to take a look. My thinking was that the different spectrum would afford me greater range with less interference from WiFi and would still have the low power consumption, small footprint and AES encryption that the ANT modules offered.
What are your impressions of the modules? Has anyone here used them?
The CC1110 is an IC, not a module. You will have to solder it into a board of your design, along with crystal, bypass caps and associated RF components. It’s not an easy job, but doable. The tough part is coding the 8051 core to tell it what you want it to do. I have built many remote sensor boards using the CC1110 as have many others on the forum. They work as advertised, but the learning curve for me was steep.
I’m not worried abot builing my own boards I’m setup and have experiane working with .5m pitch conponents. what I want to know about is things like power consumption, range. how does it compare with the Nordic units etc…
rhar:
I’m not worried abot builing my own boards I’m setup and have experiane working with .5m pitch conponents. what I want to know about is things like power consumption, range. how does it compare with the Nordic units etc…
I would say wait for the CC430. 8051 is just painful. Unfortunately with TI MSP430 supply problems at the moment, the CC430 might not be available for a couple months.
TheDirty:
I would say wait for the CC430. 8051 is just painful. Unfortunately with TI MSP430 supply problems at the moment, the CC430 might not be available for a couple months.
TheDirty:
I would say wait for the CC430. 8051 is just painful. Unfortunately with TI MSP430 supply problems at the moment, the CC430 might not be available for a couple months.
Then you need the dev tools to catch up to the new platform…Iron out the bugs…Etc,etc.
The CC1110 took over a year to release, past the release date, and still has some niggling bugs that need workarounds. That being said, I love it. Range with an omni directional 3/4" helical is over 800’. I made a quarter size tracking transmitter that pulsed once a second at full power using a 2032 coin battery, and it lasted almost 90 days. The 8051 core is straight forward to work with, offers SPI, IIC, async UARTs and can directly power a couple of LEDs right off the chip. The reset line is prone to noise issues, and sleep can be a problem if you don’t use the DMA.