Arduino Lessons Learned: Connecting to Other Microcontrollers versus Wifi

Lessons learned while designing a wifi sensor using Arduino.

Photo by John Barkiple on Unsplash

Microcontrollers, like Arduino, are well and good on their own. There is a huge diversity of modules or circuits one can set up toward useful purposes all on their own. Sometimes, you want to go beyond a single lonely Arduino. I wanted to do this with a project that I am continuing to work on towards building a wifi signal strength sensor.

I purchased components for this project based on what would most conceptually serve my purposes. As wifi can be thought of as a radio signal and I wanted a more precise means of measuring the signal, I chose an antenna-based setup. On investigating different Arduino modules, I identified NRF24L01 as what seemed to be appropriate for my purposes. The 2.4 GHz signal made me believe more that this would fit for wifi, with marketing suggesting appropriateness for “wireless” purposes going along with this.

As I have learned, this sensor is more appropriate for communication between microcontrollers than wifi after locating reference code and reading a few forums. It does not seem capable of working with wifi at all. After reading more online, I found a sensor that will fit my purposes. It is a sensor that I have used before. Still, given…