WiDo first impressions

I received my WiDos ! Three of them. They were out of stock so I had to wait a few more days after order but they eventually arrived through DHL delivery after one week of patience. I had to pay french taxes in addition the product price. Fair enough : I was warned !WiDo unboxed

The WiDo is an Arduino Leonardo compatible board including a Wifi chip and an SD card reader. It should be noted that some on the pins are used by either the wifi or the SD card : pins D4, D5, D7 and D10 are not available. Also, the wifi chip is using SPI top communicate with the microcontroller.

The Jorjin WG1300 seems to be based on the TI CC3000 chip. So it work with the Adafruit CC3000 library. There is also a WiDo fork for the library but it seems there is no change to the library itself. Only examples are updated (changing IRQ pin from 3 to 7) or created (Xively…)

I stuck to the the Adafruit original. I just loaded the buildtest example, changed IRQ pin, set my Wifi SID and WPA password… and it worked like a charm !

The only problem I have with one on the board is the mis-alignment of some headers.WiDo mis aligned headersIt is not preventing the board to work but you can’t use shields as they won’t fit. I may try to re-solder the header.

So, at around 25€, the WiDo is a great replacement for an Arduino + Wifi shield which costs around 70€ ! And it works just like the Adafruit CC3000 Wifi shield.

The next step is to port the Wifridge on WiDo.

By the way, official documentation is here.

 

 

WiDo : a WiFi connected arduino

After presenting WeIO, here is WiDo from DFRobot, yet another Open Source IoT node.

wido

Image from http://www.dfrobot.com

It is basically an Arduino Leonardo which includes a WG1300 WiFi chip. Apparently, this can be used with Adafruit’s CC3000 Arduino library which should make it quite straightforward to use.

What’s the difference between an Arduino + a CC3000 shield then ? The price ! At less that $30, it makes a quite cheap IoT plateform !

Ordered some… (DHL shipping is free until the end of september) but no more in stock. So I don’t know when I will receive them 🙁