Tiny Gecko ^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h + Microchip Wifi Project update.

I finally got my 1.27mm headers in today. They were coming in from China after all.... I didn't pay a lot of attention when I ordered.

Anyways, to recap: the guys at Farnel hooked me up with this wifi board. I planned to use it with my Tiny Gecko demo board. The Microchip board is heavily geared toward using it with PIC processors, but they release the source code to a tcp/ip stack. My plan was to port the Microchip stack to run on the Gecko, shimming in Gecko-native SPI and interrupt code in place of the PIC code.

While I was waiting for my headers, I figured I'd start working on the port, so that when the headers arrived, I'd be almost ready to connect it to my Gecko. I got about 1/3 of the way into it, and realized I was doing more work than it was worth. I decided to scrap the idea of porting the code. I'm just going to use a PIC chip, and treat it like a high level tcp/ip "black box". I'll use a UART, or maybe SPI port to send and receive socket data, and let the PIC do all the heavy lifting. Hopefully, this means I can mostly use the Microchip code "out of the box", and make a simple serial messaging protocol. This also means I can also make it portable so that it's not just for the Gecko.

I just ordered a few PIC chips and a PICKIT 3. I had always planned to get around to exploring the PIC line of chips, but now I have a good excuse.

--P

Tiny Gecko + Microchip Wifi Project.

The good folks over at Farnel (Newark in North America) got me hooked up with a 802.11b "Wifi" board that uses a 3 wire, "SPI" interface to do Wifi.

You can find it here:

I've decided to combine it with my Tiny Gecko board, I'm not sure what I'll do with it yet, it may not even be a permanent marriage of devices. (Both of these devices fall into the category of "I acquired these cool shiny toys without an actual purpose in mind, but just that they looked cool"). My purpose is to just see how easy it is to get up and running with an embedded wifi setup, and get inspired for some other uses along the way.

In this first of several posts about this effort I will focus on my first impressions with the MRF24WB0MA wifi board.