Looking for Wi-Fi

I am thinking of building an embedded system to control the heating of a building, and have identified the LPC2468-16 OEM Board from

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as a suitable Linux platform to host it (BTW, comments from those who have used those embeddedartists boards would be welcome). This board comes with built-in ethernet, USB, UART, I2C and A/D converters, and is very reasonably priced.

BUT, I need a Wifi Adapter board to go with it, so it can be configured from afar (via an on-board web server, which seems to be the fashionable way to do these things). Since the board already has ethernet, and since Linux can easily do TCP/IP, and host the web server, I had expected to find a simple board that would just wire into the on-board ethernet, and simply provide the Wifi connection with configurable WPA, etc. (and even the WPA might be managed by a suitable Linux driver).

But after an afternoon of Googling, I could not find a suitable product. Yes, there were lots of boards providing a huge overkill ("our magnificent board come with onboard TCP/IP stack, web server, and everything else you could possibly want") and lots of devices that wanted to be connected via USB or serial line (which presumably involves using some flavour of PPP as an intermediate); nothing that simply sends and receives IP packets over Wifi and nothing else.

So suggestions please, and preferably one that will work with an external antenna, because I will be hoping to connect to a base station at quite some distance (though I can get by with a fairly low bitrate).

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Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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Reply to
Charles Lindsey
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Hmm, first thought is a USB wifi adapter as you can attach it on the end of a long lead, and are there not long-range wifi standards around now (wi-max?). A quick google shows up some promising stuff for wimax and linux.

Another possibility would be a 3G modem but that depends on coverage and also needs a monthly subscription of some kind.

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Reply to
Ian Rawlings

What about a USB wifi dongle?

Or just use a standard wireless access point? The cheapest at dabs.com is 4PK4WS at =A330.03, about which they say

"By setting this access point into station mode and connecting to a network device's Ethernet port, it can let a network device that originally only supports wired Ethernet access the wireless LAN easily without changing any configuration."

Plenty of similar things on eBay, too.

Ian

Reply to
Ian

On second thoughts, wimax appears not to be set up for consumer operation of a base station, so costs of setting up your own wimax network are probably going to be high.

What kind of distances are involved? A USB adaptor with an external aerial connector might do with a high-gain antenna, like the Edimax EW-7318USg.

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Reply to
Ian Rawlings

The processor is suitable. Could you get a design with the motorola SPI interface? If so I could recommend a product.

WiFi has a range of up to 700m. You may need a LNA/PA for the WiFi chip.

With respect to WiFi software I don't know.

Reply to
Andy Botterill

Hum, tell that to the links around here that are several km long using standard Ciso WiFi kit dating back the best part of 5 years... Just needs clear line of sight and decent aerials. The short limits come from lack of line of sight and aerials not much better than a bit of damp string.

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Dave.
Reply to
Dave Liquorice

Seconded. I ran a link that was 6.5 miles long once upon a time. Proper outdoor kit, with a directional antennae at the far-end, but nothing illegal, or home-made. Just bog-standard off the shelf kit at the time (some 4-5 years back)

Gordon

Reply to
Gordon Henderson

I've wondered if using high-gain antennas is actually legal in the US. I thought I read somewhere that there's a limit on ERP which can be easily exceeded with a directional antenna.

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Grant
Reply to
Grant Edwards

connectBlue do two WLAN boards OWSPA311g and OWLAN211g. The range quoted is nowhere near what other people here have quoted. It is likely that you will have to add an LNA and a PA to achieve the range that they are quoting.

LPC2292 SO-DIMM from embedded artists has a connctor for a connectBlue module.

There may be other embedded artists boards that can do this. This is the first one that I saw.

It is not clear what the connector signals are. Assuming that they are compatible between WLAN and bluetooth you can swap technologies.

You will probably need to check that drivers exist for this module or this will not be possible.

Good luck andy.

Reply to
Andy Botterill

try this link...

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Reply to
No one

Around 500m. With houses in between.

It seems you can get external dipoles for many modules, but they are all intended to be no more than 10cm from the device. So not much opportunity to mount them high up, or outside the building.

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Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133   Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
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Reply to
Charles Lindsey

Yes, the OWLAN211g seems a possibility. It has an SPI interface, which I think is available on my board. And they do say 400m with an external antenna. But I suppose it all depends on just how you define "line of sight".

Yes, I spotted that, but they don't mention it for their LPC2468-16 Board.

--
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133   Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
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Reply to
Charles Lindsey

Mounting high up's easy. You put the router and power supply in a weatherproof box, mount it on a pole with the antenna, and run an ethernet cable and a power cable up the pole to it. That setup worked fine for us in Kabul, through a couple of very cold snowy winters and hot dusty summers!

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Reply to
Will Kemp

You will have to put a low noise amplifier (LNA) in front of the receiver and a power amplifier (PA) after the transmitter. You will need this for the extra range. I am not sure if these RF modules are supplied in a form that can be easily connected.

EPIC communications do a suitable device that covers bluetooth and wireless lan frequencies. Whether this is available as a module/PCB I don't know.

Hmm SPI I wonder...

You do need to check the connector signals for the LPC2292 PCB and the connectBLUE PCB.

Reply to
Andy Botterill

Or just use bog standard wifi routers and USB tokens with external antenna that I've seen throwing signals a mile or more across a city, however if the expensive route is the one that's desired then carry on.

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Reply to
Ian Rawlings

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