Arduino

[Knil92]

Hey,

 

So I was wondering if any one has experience with RF modules and arduino. I basically want to make LED's turn on and off and control brightness with RF modules, maybe with two arduino's one with the LED's attached, and one sending commands. Is this possible, and if so, how difficult would it be?

[pcstru]

Not very difficult. There are various RF modules though and they vary in functionality and out of the box reliability (the cheapest 433Mhz Rx/txt pairs (these types leave all the error detection/correction etc to you, whereas something like the zigbee modules pretty much take care of all that and just let you get on with sending data. The NRF24L01's and RFM12B's are somewhere in between but well documented and supported (plenty of example code and schematics out there as well as good library's ).

[Knil92]

so in terms of use, would it just be a case of hooking up the LED's and the rf module, and listening in on the pins that the rf module is connected to and doing something similar to when a button is pushed? or have it listening and then when a command is sent, change a variable and then having the arduino check what the variable is as it loops?

[pcstru]

There are various approaches and they can depend on the choice of RF module. The two basic approaches are to have a communications loop running full time and dispatch control from there OR use the RX to drive an interrupt pin which will then call the communications processing routine. Which approach is best depends on what else the system will be doing and how much communication is going on at what speed. It sounds like you have a very simple requirement which can be easily met by the first (simplest) approach.

 

An alternative would be to use a bluetooth module and build a little app to act as the TX. There are some good examples out there on exactly how to do that (there probably are for all the other RF modules now days).