I’m new to the IoT world and am working on design that require WIFI/Bluetooth and am wondering if anyone has any recommendations on pre-certified modules or how to go about selecting one?
Basically the product will have an analog sensor that needs to be read via an ADC and then this sensor data is to be sent to the cloud via WIFI. My intent is to use the Bluetooth only for initial configuration of WIFI login credentials and then Bluetooth would no longer be needed. I would like the device to connect to WIFI and transmit the sensor data it logged about once a day to minimize power consumption as this will be a battery operated device.
Does anyone have any thoughts on a good approach to selecting a module or a specific recommendation? I was looking at the Laird Sterling-EWB as it seems to be a pretty good module but I know lots of people like the Esspresif ESP32 series also… my hesitance to the ESP32 is that it seems to be extremely cheap, at least on Digikey. Any idea why the ESP32 is so much cheaper than the rest? Is the support poor? Quality questionable? Trying to understand what the trade offs are… any thoughts or advice on this topic is welcome.
ESP32 is fine for most usages, but do enough homework to know if the BLE requirement is proven. The weakness of ESP32 is the Bluetooth stack.
I’m reading kvk’s post, and I’m guessing the “reasons” are related to security. If you’re not bothered about having enterprise security free of Chinese government backdoors into the network, it’s great.
Another option is a MT7688 module (there are many, or you could roll your own if you follow Jay Carlson’s embedded linux review). I LOVE the MT7688 as a connected WiFi device. It runs Linux. You can run Python on it. IMO it’s the best for rapid prototyping. It doesn’t have BLE, but it does have a camera peripheral that you can leverage for QR code reading.
I’m biased since I work for Particle, but the Argon would do what you need if you can live with Device OS handling the connectivity. It’s easy to swop out for a LTE (Boron) unit if needed too.
Thanks for the tip! I need both WIFI and BLE… it seems the S2 version is WIFI only though, so I don’t think its an option for me unfortunately.
Out of curiosity, how do you go about estimating power consumption for a module like this? Ideally I would want the MCU running and monitoring an analog sensor via ADC and saving sensor data to memory and then once a day or so the device would activate the WIFI and transmit the sensor data it collected to the cloud and then shut off power to the radio to conserve energy. The product I’m working on is going to be battery powered so in order to size the battery I need to estimate power consumption somehow and its not clear to me how to do this from the ESP32 datasheets… any thoughts?