Wifi Cards / tranceivers (hardware)

Wireless & IoT
1

I was wondering if anyone knew where to get wifi chips / boards that I can use to develop something for my senior project in college (other than here at sparkfun). I need something that can connect or send messages to another unit. I’d like it to have a range of more than 50 m and as cheap as possible (ideally 50 bucks or less). It doesn’t need to be complicated, but I’d like it to be easy to use and flexible. The Airborne wifi module here looks great, but I’m hoping I can find something cheaper (since I don’t need crazy the web serving stuff that it has).

Non-wifi stuff would work for me too, but i’m looking for wifi cause it’ll make the design more flexible. Anyone know where to look?

2

consider two Maxstream XBee modules. less than $50 for the pair. Plug and play. Serial port extension. line of sight range about 300 ft.

XBeePro are 10x the transmitter power; line of sight range 1/2 mile or so.

build your own board to plug these into. Or use coridium.net’s wireless ARMmite AMR7 as the host. Or the Ardiuno (more costly, kinda odd).

These follow the IEEE 802.15.4 standard MAC/PHY and Maxstream is one of many vendors for interoperable modules. ZigBee is OPTIONAL, a cluster-tree or mesh networking protocol atop the MAC. Not needed for simple apps.

I don’t know of any low cost 802.11/WiFi equivalents.